yes i am talking about LN.
let's say I want to pay Alice 0.1BTC for a service she frequently renders ( weekly )
will LN be useful to us?
of course Alice needs to be able to spend the funds i give her weekly...
so my question is, when the channel is opened and a 0.1BTC signed and handed off, will Alice be able to use those funds or does she have to wait until the channel is closed to make use of the money i give her?
Unless the payment to another person can be routed through you (by being a hop), I think that Alice would need to close the channel in order to pay someone else.
Yup. Except those 10 channel txs are not going to be free (although must be cheaper than on-chain ones).
Nope. Transactions between two people that happen in a channel (meaning it doesn't go through hops) won't have any extra fees. The fees only come in if you have to have the payment hop through other nodes.
So in conclusion, LN is useless for any non-recurring (or not very frequent) transactions.
Yes. That's the point. It removes the recurring micro transactions like faucet payouts from the blockchain.
And the 'fee market' will have to be kept under control (central planning?) either directly by devs or by implementing some sort of flexible max block size, in order to make on-chain txs high enough to provide sufficient reward for miners (and push people toward 2nd layer solutions) but low enough to make opening/closing channels and perform non-recurring txs affordable.
Not necessarily. There will be plenty of transactions happening on chain because they are not recurring payments. Opening and closing channels also has to pay fees.