I really don't see how Lightning Network would affect miners, unless you are comparing it to having much larger blocks which would mean more money for miners. But if the idea is same block size and lots of congestion then bitcoin will die anyways because it won't be a viable payment platform and the price will stop going up and everyone will then jump ship, so that is a lose for miners. Use of bitcoin will continue to increase, lightning network will just allow it to scale much much more, but blocks will still be getting transactions from txs that aren't on lightning network plus anytime a payment channel is opened and closed, which I would think companies would want to close them at least every couple of weeks in order to get their money.
I'm not too aware of the current state of the lightning network, but I'm pretty sure it won't activate on bitcoin for quite some time. There is probably lots of testing to do on it. Plus wallets and other bitcoin software would have to add the lightning network software to their software right?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I understand the LN is that several different companies are creating their own LNs, they will act as the LN provider. And basically wallets will need to decide which provider they use. As more clients choose a given LN implementation that LN will grow and when a client (a bitcoin user or a bitcoin using merchant/store) opens up a payment channel they will be able to send and receive funds through the LN from anyone on that provider's LN. The LN provider will still charge a small fee since they are running this LN service, from what I read based on a % (maybe 0.1%) of the each LN transaction, which would suggest LN would only make more sense from a fee perspective for non-large transactions, say like a few hundred dollars or less, but still that would probably be the majority of transactions. This will allow small purchases (like a $4 coffee with a 0.4 cent fee instead of a ~20 cent on-chain fee) or online micropayments of a few cents where the fee is only a tiny fraction of a cent. And the only thing recorded on the blockchain is the initial opening of each payment channel and then the closing of the payment channel.
Is a payment channel just between two users? Or once you open a payment channel can that money be routed to anyone in the network? Or is it like I open a payment channel with Target, I send them money, the channel is still open, they have a ton of other channels open with people/companies, then can they send money to say a company through another of their payment channels to buy more product using the money I and others sent them through our own channels? And when we close our channel it doesn't matter where else that money went, all that matters is the final amounts for the transactions between me and Target? And when the channel is closed Target would pay the on-chain tx fee.
I think as long as the UX around using LN doesn't differ much from normal on-chain bitcoin use LN can be popular and could potentially provide massive scaling for bitcoin. Though I'm not sure how, from a UX perspective, the inconvenience of having funds tied up in a payment channel would work. Would people just accept that they're gonna lock away maybe a few weeks worth of spending money on bitcoin at a time. I guess it could work if its just a button to close up the payment channel anytime you want, and if a given LN implementation is connected to most merchants eventually so you can route the money easily through the network to most merchants with a single payment channel.
If anyone has any more insight into how the LN would work from a technical or UX perspective please comment
