out of curiosity which part? the 9 year old white paper never mentions payment channels
this isn't an opinion about any bitcoin fork, just curiosity about what you are referring to. you say its not hard to read satoshi's words, but you rely on having to read and interpret every single forum post scattered around the internet?
Many of us as has hung around the forum for some time, and followed the discussions as they went along. (If it's any consolation, most with only intellenctual interest and not based on any desire to wire money to some gung-ho Japanese corporation without proper business accounts, which is easy to regret now. But I disgress.) Satoshi posted under that username to mailing lists and forum. They contain everything and it's all open to search, but if you're not looking for something specific it might seem overwhelming.
The white paper is only the overview of the underlying system. You're not going to find anything about the marketplace (look that up, it's funny), payment systems or other applications of Bitcoin in there.
That's why I mentioned the wiki. Like all wikis it's bit rotten and outdated, but it contains a lot of good pointers to the source material, both code and discussions. The page about "Payment channels" isn't a bad first guess. It is too old to help you understand modern systems like Lightning, but it will contain pointers to several other payment channels that have been proposed. Including Nakamoto fast transactions, which as the name might suggest was suggested by Satoshi. It turned out to be a flawed design, but the underlying ideas are basically the same as today.
As an interesting side note, that design was based on replaceable transactions. Another popular thing to copy paste into Bitcoin discussions is some conspiracy why this was developed (and it was indeed proposed for removal in the altcoin chain released today), but here you can see it was actually in Bitcoin from the beginning and how it was supposed to work.
You will also note that many other developers were sceptical about payment channels and preferred instead to work on sidechains, ecash bonds, and other methods. It's not like Poon and Dryja worked in a vacuum, but their work looks like it could actually be useful. Personally I don't expect it to be the final design for payment channels, and there are still much work to do on other methods of zero-confirmation high-throughput payment networks for Bitcoin (such as the above mentioned).
There's still a tremendous amount of work on the technical side of Bitcoin almost every day. Much of it just isn't end user visible because people are still laying the ground work for things to come. We're still very early. This is probably also the reason why these types of work doesn't stir up so much discussion on the mailing list. People are not going to re-base their ongoing work to some other codebase just because someone on Twitter threw a tantrum.
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.
So an interpretation to support an ideal despite the optional nature of payment channels, got it. I had ctrl+f "payment channels" and got zero results.
Payment channels, as described by the lightning network, are optional.
The mempool on both chains are practically empty and both chains function the same, until the mempool is full.
One chain will allow for optionally greater throughput via payment channels and possible a block size expansion.
One chain will allow for block propagation upwards of 8 megabytes.
Neither relies exclusively on third parties. The first mentioned chain has an optional ironic future where everyone operates a payment channel and eventually consolidates into one payment channel provider, I guess.
Both chains have other "threats" towards centralization.
this isn't an opinion about any bitcoin fork, just curiosity about what you are referring to. you say its not hard to read satoshi's words, but you rely on having to read and interpret every single forum post scattered around the internet?