Lightning appears to add more problems than solutions. It has a whole bunch of critical issues. Here is a short list.
1. You need to have a computer constantly online or your counter party can easily steal all your money. This leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of attacks.
2. The lightning network works by routing payments through a network to your destination. The issue here is that the routing for the lightning network is extremely complicated and is currently an unsolved (and probably unsolvable) problem. The core issue is that you have to route money though a network where channel capacities are changing with each and every transaction. Imagine trying to route internet packets if the size of the links changed thousands of times per second.
3. It's relatively expensive to create and destroy channels at about two transactions per channel. Lightning proponents claim that this will be rare, but that can only be the case if there is minimal net flow of money. This is trivially not the case because users will be sending bitcoin more than they recieve and the reverse for retailers.
4. Lightning has huge capital costs. You need to lock up large amounts of bitcoin in these channels for significant amounts of time. There is a real cost for this in terms of the lost interest. Channels are certainly not anywhere close to free.
1. You need to have a computer constantly online or your counter party can easily steal all your money. This leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of attacks.
2. The lightning network works by routing payments through a network to your destination. The issue here is that the routing for the lightning network is extremely complicated and is currently an unsolved (and probably unsolvable) problem. The core issue is that you have to route money though a network where channel capacities are changing with each and every transaction. Imagine trying to route internet packets if the size of the links changed thousands of times per second.
3. It's relatively expensive to create and destroy channels at about two transactions per channel. Lightning proponents claim that this will be rare, but that can only be the case if there is minimal net flow of money. This is trivially not the case because users will be sending bitcoin more than they recieve and the reverse for retailers.
4. Lightning has huge capital costs. You need to lock up large amounts of bitcoin in these channels for significant amounts of time. There is a real cost for this in terms of the lost interest. Channels are certainly not anywhere close to free.