Lightning network will be good to pay on stores and places you visit often in which you trust the owner of the store and places and allows you to open a channel with them. You buy what you want to buy like coffee, and you will pay right at the moment even before leaving the coffee shop, I do not think this should be a problem. And you can decide to close your channel anytime you want in which your Bitcoin will be transferred into your on-chain wallet address and be stored on blockchain.
^ there describes the opening of another flaw
people cannot predict what they may want to buy in the next week or month.
so the supposed opening a channel with a coffee shop and then closing a channel premise is flawed because it ends up being spending 2 onchain(open+close) just to buy coffee
the real thing is people dont end up having lots of small channels with their temporary retailer.
instead they have channels a few hub/spoke/hops away and hop the path to their temporary retailer has value and is online at the point of purchase
this requires the trust and ideals of several people inbetween
also users wont want to set up dozens of accounts splitting up their funds for the hopes of multiple paths. because they end up having to close channels more often to rebalance the funds
EG if you only trust $200..
and a coffee is $4 thats only 50 coffees in a 1 channel route.
but its only 10 coffess if you split your funds over 5 channels.
thus costing you more onchain to open 5 channels of only 10 coffees each. and then close them to move funds to the channels that have good routes
(you cant predict the goodroute vs bad route before hand)
studies have seen 50-90% of payments fail due to not having viable routes.
this study showed a 60% success rate for a single $4 coffee
buying 2 coffees is a 50% chance of success
buying 10 coffees for colleagues in your office.. 10% chance of success
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn0.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2018%2F06%2FScreen-Shot-2018-06-26-at-3.45.32-PM.png&t=665&c=JCIZpEHVPTgBgg)
what people end up doing is getting rid of the headaches of multi channal fund splitting hop model network.
and instead deposit funds into a service and let the service manage the channels offchain and reaggregate funds offchain as the funds are with the manager.
this will result in centralisation