Right now at the moment its not a good idea to use the lightning network except for very small micropayments which you send out completely at your own risk.
size does not matter.
Most of the sites that accept it at the moment such as Blockstream or the VPN web service, are only using it because its for payments around $10 or so. And each of them are aware of the current risks.
so far as I know, nobody is really using it yet (that is why I said more of a future solution) these use cases (selling shirt by blockstream?) and the VPN thing was for testing purposes and showing how it works. there also have been others such as buying a coffee, etc. they use small payments because it is meant to show how small payments are possible for no fee using LN. otherwise buying a Lamborghini using LN doesn't really say much
There are many bugs currently and there are also probably tons of bugs out that haven't been discovered yet. Basically think of it like the ETH DAO hack back in 2016.
DAO was and still is a fundamental bug in ETH platform that can happen at any time again and it has already happened at least 3 times with 3 other smart contracts if I am not mistaken but the size were small and the ETH foundation didn't lose any money because of it so it stayed out of the news. and the fork didn't solve anything about it.
don't compare that with LN which is a new software and may have some bugs.
...
you are saying it is a future solution, any idea when this will be usable/start?
thx
as I said I am not an expert in this matter so you may want to consult someone else too.
but as far as I can tell it is ready. the protocol (just like bitcoin protocol) has been ready for a very long time and (just like bitcoin has bitcoin core, electrum, armory, multibit,...) there are multiple implementation of it in different projects. these projects are rather new and need more testing but you can still use them and start looking into each of them and see which one is more suitable to your need.
