statoshi

It's still pretty rare, but as the space goes mainstream I expect the frequency of such attacks to increase.

Anything that can be owned can be stolen.

It's a question of how difficult you make to steal and thus how much riskier you make it for someone to attempt an attack.

You sound confused; I'm the author of the article, not the subject.

Nope, but the value of the educational takeaways from the report are not contingent upon me providing evidence of this specific attack. You are welcome to be skeptical.

Our client's privacy is more important than your curiosity; it's as simple as that.

Indeed; the market has clearly chosen to prefer optimizing for low cost of full system validation (running a full node) over lost cost of transacting (cheap block space.)

False. You're referring to an adversarial situation where your payment channel counterparty tries to close the channel using an old state that gives them more of the money in the channel than they should own. The duration during which you can then post a breach remedy transaction to deprive them of ALL the channel value is configurable when you update the channel state, but the default is 1 week. Eventually the expectation is that you'll even be able to outsource this operation to third parties to monitor the blockchain on your behalf and post the breach remedy transaction if needed.

Nonsense. Multiple teams are developing Lightning Network implementations and anyone who desires to commit capital to operate a Lightning node can do so without asking permission from anyone.

Fraud protection is referring to protection against double spending and protection against chargebacks - it's not the same type of consumer protection that folks are used to with credit cards. However, it's worth noting that this type of consumer protection /is/ possible and can be built on top of the system using reputation and escrow services.