In this story it doesn’t sound like the transaction fees ended up any lower than they are now. I sure hope the lightning network wont be as useless as stories like this imply.
The Alice and Bob story with the Coffee shop is the fob off story the lightning team are using here and clearly
it won't work in reality for the reasons that I have listed and documented but in part two I will
cover the real deal of how it will work once people see the hubs for what they are, Banks and then
yes it could save you money but only if you open a bank account.............. err...... sorry........channel
and deposit you own coins by having locks placed on you BTC coins at the central banks .... err...... I mean
Bitcoin block-chain
Forget any talk about Bitcoin then being able to process 596 or a billion transactions per second even if we
ignore the hubs being banks and fees grandly increasing (Miner will run the banks) because the best this
"Lightning Network" will achieve in terms of performance increase is something like a factor of ten unless we
all significantly change our behavior and start acting like Bob the Builder because inter bank, sorry Hub settlement
will also add extra transactions to the Bitcoin main block-chain that can only process seven transactions per second.
oh yes anyone can close a channel (well for now anyway
) so if your in credit with a banking hub and you force the bank to send you $1 that
is owed back to you so they get hit with the main block-chain $30 transaction fee then they are not going to be very happy so do read
the terms and conditions before signing any contract with bankers and watch out for credit agency checks.
So far I have assumed that locking coins on the main block-chain is free but the poor old miners not
getting $30 per transaction might well have other plans about that little free service