How are you so certain LN will ever be implemented? I'm more confident Vitalik could get PoS working before LN ever gets here. LN is vaporware and was supposed to be here long ago, yet here we are.
Lightning Network unfortunately depended on transaction malleability being fixed. This was, I believe, fixed by segwit. So it's only been a possibility since August - and the Lightning Network Daemon has been under heavy development. It can now run on the Bitcoin network itself, but is not yet in a state where it works "automagically", nor would many people depend on the code being relatively bug-free yet.
I'm actually very surprised at how slow the LN dev is going. There is actually a working version of Raiden (full, not just µRaiden) on an ethereum testnet, I'm really not sure why LN on bitcoin is going so slowly.
"In this video Laolu (co-founder of Lightning Labs) demonstrates a multi-hop payment on Bitcoin's mainnet which travels across the 3 major Lightning implementations. In the demo Laolu (a.k.a roasbeef) sends a payment from our Lightning desktop app (https://github.com/lightninglabs/ligh...) to Starblocks, a coffee payment demo."
"This payment marks the first multi-hop, cross-implementation payment on Bitcoin's mainnet. All transaction performed in the video were performed completely off-chain, instantly, and with virtually zero fees. Lightning allows instant, low-fee payments on Bitcoin, enabling the system to scale further for the next wave of adoption. Additionally, Lightning unlocks a new class of use cases for Bitcoin enabled by the ability to instantly send low-fee payments on the system."
By analogy to driverless cars, it'd make sense to avoid letting your car out on public roads; but it wouldn't make sense to avoid building a prototype and running it around a test track. A real thing lends itself to iteration much better than an on-paper idea does.
In that case Ethereum shouldn't exist at all. Solidity and the EVM itself are a good example of that philosophy. If they weren't gonna move fast they should have waited until they had a better story for static analysis and model checking of smart contracts.
Not necessarily. Keep in mind when Ethereum started, it had no value. But with bitcoin, there is huge value and so potentiality for people to loose a lot of money if there was one minor bug.
Because LN is flawed as an idea. Who wants to lock in their Bitcoin to a LN channel to pay only one entity on the other end repeatedly? It doesn't make any sense. If, and that's a huge if, you got a lot of people to lock their money up in various interconnected LN channels how do you route money through these channels in a way that is fast and inexpensive? No one has answered that question definitively.
LN proponents have put LN forward as this magical scaling solution were you can effortlessly transact Bitcoin off-chain both cheaply and inexpensively. The nontechnical believers have lapped it up not knowing that LN is an incomplete idea that starts with locking your coin up in one or more channels and end with some magical and as of yet undiscovered distributed routing network that finds a path through existing channels from channels you've already committed to, to channels your payee has committed to. That such a path exists, is cost effective and is reliable, in that your coins don't get stuck somewhere along the way, is an open question. In short, LN is half baked at best.
LN testnets are up and running, transactions work, and there's a cross-platform desktop app in beta. It's almost here, will likely go into production sometime in 2018.
