About Bitcoin Lightning Network and transaction fee

[Mpamaegbu]

But my question remains "what's the advantage?"

I can open a channel well in advance of making payments. I can wait for transaction fees to be 1 sat/vbyte to open my channel, and then I can pay people from that channel at a later date when transaction fees are high without having to pay those high transaction fees. I can open my channel on the weekend when I'm in no rush and wait the minutes to hours for the confirmations needed, and then when I buy my coffee during the week the payments are instant. I can open a channel once, and then buy coffee 100 times from that channel.

Now I get it! Thanks for the insight. I wish I had sMerit to reward you for your time. I am leaving your comment in whole so I can always re-read it over time.

Merci

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[LoyceV]

you will still need to open a channel with the restaurant or someone that have already opened a channel with the restaurant.

I don't think the future of LN will be small businesses setting up nodes to connect to. It's much more likely the restaurant uses a large well-connected payment processor, and your own LN wallet will be connected to a large exchange.
Businesses with many transactions (such as online casinos and very large webshops) will still use their own nodes. I expect more or less the same businesses that already run their own full Bitcoin node to eventually run their own LN-node too.

[o_e_l_e_o]

-snip-

I would agree with this. Not only will small businesses not want to run their own node, but customers will not want to open a new channel with every small business they use. Opening a channel directly to every small business I currently regularly spend bitcoin at would result in me having to juggle four or five channels, monitor the balance, top up, etc., and opening a new channel for every one off payment at a new business/shop/merchant I stumble across defeats the entire point of Lightning in the first place. Unless you are only regularly spending bitcoin at one or two places, in which case you could make an argument to directly open a channel to them if they give you that option, then it makes much more sense for the customer to open a channel to a well connected hub and route the payments that way.

I would also expect a third party Lightning payment processor in the same style as something like BitPay (as much as I despise them) to be launched at some point. I pay the payment processor over Lightning, and then they pay the business in question the corresponding amount of fiat.

[LoyceV]

I would also expect a third party Lightning payment processor in the same style as something like BitPay (as much as I despise them) to be launched at some point. I pay the payment processor over Lightning, and then they pay the business in question the corresponding amount of fiat.

CoinPayments.net accepts Bitcoin (Lightning Network), I've used it to buy (cheap) hosting. Although they don't pay the merchant in fiat, I kinda expect another third party in between the merchant and payment, because I've seen different websites offer the same set of payment methods.