personally i have made mega profit from btc, but to me its the ethos i cared much more about. and here is how i seen it

imagine it like housing
you lived in an apartment complex with an over protective maintenance guy, named the 'gov' who loved coming into your apartment at his leisure under the pretence of fixing the plumbing/electrics as a service he provides as part of you living in his building.
you then hear about this new thing.. its called a detached self contained house. great you move out of the complex and get your own house

now here is the rub. you now realise that there is a toll road at your suberb/block.. $5 everytime you wanna come in or out. you also find out that your plumbing is costly too. the house loses all its utility and desire to use. but you hold onto it anyway purely for its real estate value.

but after a few years although millions of people are holding onto houses that cost a bomb just to enter, and have no utilities, the demand for housing is still there because the real estate values are booming. and people think they can get rich just holding onto empty houses

eventually though. people realise that all the houses are functionally useless and cost more than other living conditions.

in short. bitcoins value is now only speculative real estate boom.. not real living in independent comfort value.

to be hub you need to have connected to many channels.
this means depositing funds into MANY addresses to open such channels and have enough funds to act as a provider(hubs are for rich guys)

also to be a successful hub you need to be listed as part of LN's DNS seed (routing table).

..
that said we both agree its not a replacement for bitcoin. its just a third party service. thus does not actually alleviate bitcoins situation. infact when a hub needs to close its channels, it will be a blanket bomb effect because to ensure the hubs many channels tally onchain. it will ned to close them all simultaneously and with a large enough onchain fee for each of those tx's to ensure block acceptance

think of it this way. at the moment the blocks can only handle around 2500 tx's. which means when its time to close a hubs channels. that hub better not have connections to more than 2500 customers, otherwise there will be a bottleneck.

and yes hubs will need to close channels because funds will need to move. to refill the channels
EG

if A connects to B which connects to C
if A wants to use B as the hub to pay C for a coffe each day

A+B have a channel and both fund it
B+C have a channel and both fund it

so day 1
channel1      |     channel2
A:0.001        |     B:0.001
B:0.001        |     C:0.001

so day 2 - a pays b in channel 1 .. and then B separately uses B's channel2 funds to pay C.. the funds of channel 1 dont physically touch C. its B that does the borrowing for A
channel1       |     channel2
A:0.0009       |     B:0.0009
B:0.0011       |     C:0.0011

so day 10 - a pays b in channel 1 .. and then B separately uses B's channel2 funds to pay C.. the funds of channel 1 dont physically touch C. its B that does the borrowing for A
channel1       |     channel2
A:0.0000       |     B:0.0000
B:0.002         |     C:0.002

A in channel one has nothing left.
B in channel two has nothing left. thus B will need to close channels to settle up

now imagine it if B was paypal with thousands of customers not just 2

stil unsure about the need to close channels.
imagine you had a $30 walmart giftcard.
your wife gives you $10 CASH and says she wants to buy stuff at walmart with your giftcard.
your wife the next week gives you another $10 cash, same again

your wife cannot just keep handing you $10 forever and just use the walmart card. at som point you will have $30 CASH in one hand and a walmart card of $0 balance so you will need to refill the giftcard with the cash. which involves closing and reopening channels

LN is another bitcoin ethos losing scheme.
research multisig/smart contracts
then review LN technically, not optimistically... its an eye opener

then when you actually look at LN you will see that people will need to transfer funds into a co-owned address with a counter party.
which is pretty much like depositing funds into a walmart giftcard to then spend funds at walmart and whereby walmart can then act as your banker if you wanted to spend your walmart funds at any other merchant(with extra fees added for that privilege)

LN is banking 2.0.

other issues are that although its said to be dirt cheap tx fee's inside LN, ALL LN proposals are more infavour of the hubs/counterparties making money out of being hubs/counterparties/service providers by means of charging a fee.

oh and may you not forget to get your funds into a LN channel you need to do a onchain transaction.  and as such it will still cost a lot just to deposit into a LN channel. much like having to pay a few dollars just to use paypal.. yet in the real world paypal are not stupid enough to charge people just to deposit with them

there are many, many other issues with LN. but in short its not the scaling solution.. its a off chain service to avoid the headaches of bitcoin by compromising your funds into no longer permissionless controlled account.

p.s i lost my optimism when blockstream took over the reigns after 2014.. bitcoins ethos has not been the same since then
.. yes i spelled reigns intentionally because the devs think they are the new head of state

bitcoin has many different parts

sha hashes are binary
ECDSA are vectors

quantum computers are not really going to do much harm to binary, because what quantum needs to do is to while calculating outside the realm of binary, it needs to ensure the result and method can be solvable by a binary system. thus limiting quantum's capabilities

however vectors are at risk. quantum computers can solve vector issues much faster
its been suggested that quantum computers can solve a sha only 2x as fast as a binary computer but solve a vector 65536 faster

and with quantum computers only having half a dozen units at a low processing power.. compared to the combined bitcoin network of ASIC power... quantum computers has no chance of bruteforcing sha hashes any time soon

.. but ecdsa has some risks.. given enough time

bitcoin lost that ethos of taking control of money

i too had your mindset when i too started in 2012.

but the politics of a certain dev team and their ambition to intensionally hike the fee's up have priced bitcoin out of the daily us money market. and now bitcoin is just a speculation asset with little to no real world function.

in short it flipped out of the money market and now in the stock market, as a close analogy as you can get.
no one wants to swap shares to buy a coffee. re certifying a share to a new owner costs too much

i think its about making it self validatable and auditable for his facebook credit system between his payment gate way and all his partners in the games industry(like zynga) and advertisers(like google)

simply to not have to employ auditors and security guards and able to pay his partners in a way they can verify funds easily and cheaply.

yes even in a closed system just the auditing/verifying element of blockchain tech can save on staffing costs.
after all mining pools dont need to employ accountants to verify tx balances. its all handled by code

some devs have proposed this many many many times.
simply changing the cap from 21mill to a bigger number can be done but a majority of nodes need to accept this new rule.

in actual fact there are 2.1 quadrillion shareable units of measure (called satoshi's) right now
21000000.00000000 bitcoin
2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshi's

some people have tried also to pretend to keep the 100million satoshi basket term of bitcoin at 21mill baskets.. but allow more units of measure/shareable units(sats/millisats) per basket(bitcoin)

this is where bips about allowing millisats have been proposed. but the end result is the same
increasing the shareable units of measure above 2.1quadrillion, either by allowing more baskets(bitcoin) above 21mill or allowing more units per basket(millisats) both RUIN the rarity value of the currency.

its like gold.. if its known that there are only about 200 tonnes of gold with 170t mined so far and someone comes along and says they can make a million tonnes in a laboratory.. the gold market will plunge..... answering your question. it would be lower

just be happy that there are 2.1quadrillion shareable units

yes i have
another tip

if you have lets say 1btc. dont throw it all on one order

only make orders of 0.1btc for instance.
if the price drops you then have 9 other opportunities to buy more CHEAPER.
instead of having no funds and just crying and waiting for the rise before you can trade again, knowing you missed oppertunities

as they say never put all your eggs into one basket

..
other tip. dont wait around for 10-100% profit before selling.
add up the commission(fee) cost of buying and selling..
add that onto the buy price. then add on 1% of that total to give you a suggested sell price with 1% profit

its easier to make 10x 1% profit in a faster time than waiting for 1x10% profit

last tip..
never sell at a loss.. thats what the other 0.9btc is for. to BUY at a price drop treating it as a good discount day. not to sell at a loss treating it as a day to cry

gdax does have 2 prices.
see their charts.. red and green bid and ask buy and sell

ignore values in screenshot. its an old image from google search i used as example. but on the left you can see there is a 29cent difference between the buy and sell

new hampshire project tried it. (google search can explain the rest of the story)

the buy is always higher.

if it was the other way round people would buy and instantly sell for guaranteed profit. no one would ever lose

trading works by you buying at a price and waiting for the overall value to increase, whereby the new price would allow you to sell.
EG
day 1: buy:16640.45. sell price 16460.20
day 2: buy:16940.45. sell price 16760.20

buy 1btc on day1 and sell it on day2 = $119.75 profit

that said most FX platforms are not actually trading real bitcoins but just playing around with a database they own with numbers they input.
if you cannot deposit or withdraw bitcoins and your only able to deposit and withdraw fiat while only 'playing' with a cough btc cough price on their platform. stay away from it. its not real

its like boiler room gambling on racehorses without actually buying a ticket
its like boiler room gambling on stocks/shares without actually buying a certificate

the real cause of this is much more simpler then people think. and surprisingly its not actually bitcoin related

many banks do not care about bitcoin.
here is the thing, FIAT does not get burned/vanish when a transfer occurs. it just moves from one persons account to another persons account. bitcoin does NOT destroy fiat, so banks dont care about the conomic impact of bitcoin. its irrelevant to them

what they do care about is if the recipient of the funds has had flag warnings related to chargebacks.

yes thats right, scammers who send money to coinbase, get their bitcoins and withdraw bitcoins, then call up their banks and claim "theft" to try getting a chargeback (wire reversal)

and its the amount of wire reversal claims that these banks then flag coinbase and others as high risk.
this has happened alot. even individual coin sellers on localbitcoins have been victim to this even without ever touching coinbase or informing their bank the use of the funds. the banks flag them as high risk due to chargeback scammers claiming the 'service' scammed them. when infact is the claimer thats doing the scammer, and thus it then effects others who know the recipient is innocent but the banks treat the recipient as a high risk

what will happen is new regulation that only BANKS can create cryptos and any other non bank will get done for counterfeiting and such.

plus it will be smartcontracts, like lightning where people deposit funds into a smart contract so the counterparty has dual control of th funds. thus its not going to be permissionless.. many numbskulls dont realise that lightning IS banking due to smart contracts with a hub/counterparty control

lastly because banks will have access to the funds its not that much different in regards to customer 'ownership' of funds than traditional banking systems.. the only real benefit is to the banks by not needing as much security/auditing personnel.. i see little to no benefit for bank customers for a bank using crypto.

in short. getting excited that a bank makes their own crypto is the opposite to a revolution.
but hey, all im ever gonna read is people shouting "this will cause price rise due to a media coverage and speculation"

you defense is that it cost you only $20 in fee's... but..... you still had to wait hours, and at laggy times even longer.

i think you need to re-assess yourself if you think that even $20 is acceptable.
imagine if you bought something in a shop. and the retailer said thats $10.. you hand them a $100 and they say they will give you back $70 in 2-5 hours.

wake up. the dev's behind core have lost all recognition of what bitcoins 2009-2014 ethos was, they are sellouts and have done stupid crap to ruin bitcoin not make it better

and the only rebuttal i ever here is "but the price is rising so good investment, never use it to buy things just hodl" (facepalm)

anyway, on topic
the UK banking system ALREADY for decades now has a banking system that lets people wire transfer funds instantly FOR FREE.. its called "faster payments" only a few lazy second rate banks put a un-needed delay/fee's on wire transfers

this is what happens when core puts code in to deliberately ban nodes that are not core. it opens the floodgate of alts. and centralises code control more in favour of core

if core left it for the orphaning mechanism (consensus) to function. then the script kiddies would actually need to re-code alot more, and thus less altcoins would occur.

but now we have this centralised system where the only time the bitcoin network upgrades, is if core have controlled it.

but hey no one cares about decentralisation, they just care about free coins and a false presence of decentralisation which is actually just distribution

'decentralisation is dead, long live coin distribution'

or the protocol starts measuring in 100byte/sat instead of 1byte/sat
lame brain developers think the protocol cant go below 1byte/sat without having to add millisat units if measure. but they are wrong. it can be done, if they really thought about it.

also a new fee priority formulae could be added that actually works.

bitcoin has LOST its utility appeal. and only has its investment appeal left.

however litecoin with its lower fee's and ability to be used for household transactions has given it the perception of being better than bitcoin.
though many think 'bitcoin cash' bitcoin gold and other bitcoin offshoots dominate.. they all lack the main thing.. utility.

if things like bitpay and coinbases merchant shopping cart api's were to take on a new coin. that coin would surpass all others in the utility perception. and right now it looks like litecoin is getting close to that

nope its done by nodes.

pools collate the data into batches. but the nodes validate and accept/reject it

its not mining hashrate

for instance imagine you owned a pool with DOUBLE the hashrate of the entire network. but your codebase of your pool node wanted to change a rule..
all that will happen is that your blocks will get rejected by the network because their desired rules are not your rules.
you could mine billions of blocks but only you would retain them and everyone else would reject them. thus  you have made your own altcoin that only you hold

consensus is about the NODES that accept the rules. hash power has nothing to do with the RULES. the hashpower is only about protecting the DATA from people manipulating the data retrospectively. EG for someone to make a block that does not contain certain transactions (attempted refund) from a block in 2012. then that pool needs to also recreate every block after that to get uptodate to todays blockheight. and the rules must match to not get rejected.

in short hashrate does not determine the rules. it just makes changing old data harder

---

the politics of CORE controlling the rules.. is the thing people are avoiding talking about. because its core that set the rules and push people to download their wallet as oppose to other wallets. thus they control the development and they control the rules. and yes they do and have bribed big names to get their way. (many free all inclusive weekend breaks, jobs, bonuses, freebies and more)

# bitcoin payment is anoymous pseudonymous
# bitcoin is decentralized distributed
# bitcoin is not issued by any
# nobody core can increase total supply of

1.many scammers have had their funds traced via the blockchain. examples are the agents that investigated silkroad got arrested because it was found out the agents themselves were taking funds out of silk road,.. also the mtgox funds are known. and other funds can be traced. so its not anonymous. its pseudonymous. for instance it took me 0.5 seconds to find out catmony owns 1CzctPaiivoMJLwTCEVQZvzLWWtbfP7ENo

2. the data is distributed. but there is a centralised hub that CONTROLS what the rules should be.. its known as core. there have been too many instances that the control of the bips(proposals) and the direction of new features/abilities of bitcoin have gone down one direction of one group of linked people.

3. mining pools issue new coins.. new coins are issued ~144 times a day. if new coins were not issued then all 21mill would be in existence and no more coins could be made

4. core can and have proposed to increase the units of measure.. as part of their lightning project the main devs are trying to push

in short
bitcoin does not have the same ethos of 2009-2014