> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising.
it's actually worse than that - lightning only works in the context of centralized banking. It presumes there is some other entity with whom you can hold a channel open, who you do roughly equivalent amounts of deposits and withdrawals from. If that criterion is not met, then you have to keep closing channels and re-opening new ones, each of which incurs a new transaction fee just like if you did it yourself. So it is still expensive to send arbitrary transactions, it is just now relatively cheap to do "banking" with a single entity.
That entity sending money for you may still be expensive as well. If they have another entity who they do roughly equal amounts of transactions and withdrawals from then yes, they can nominally transact that for free, but they will still probably charge you for the service, and having that bank send a payment to an arbitrary user with whom they don't have balanced deposits/withdrawals incurs the normal bitcoin transaction fee. You can see where all of this is going - Lightning doesn't really solve anything, it still is only optimized for transactions between large, centralized entities.
Oh, and if you ever lose power or internet then your channel has to be closed and resolved, then reopened if you want to do further business. So you have to pay a transaction fee every time you lose internet (or there is a routing problem somewhere on the net) or power.
This is incorrect and highly misleading. You don't have to open and close channels like that. Instead you keep them open and do circular rebalances when your channels are imbalanced. As an experiment I've been running an lnd node for the last 6 months. During this time I've routed 1445 transactions totalling 4.68249963 BTC (~223K USD currently) and only closed a handful of channels, using single digit sat/vB as it's not urgent. Lightning transaction fees in general are negligible at today's btc price. You transact with all your peers for free while you usually pay a fraction of a cent for sending transactions anywhere in the graph. Transactions are pretty much instant.
After running it for 6 months, I could certainly criticise various aspects of lnd but none of what you have written falls into the valid criticism category.
This sounds cool, do you have any recommended resources to get started with running a lnd node and getting it connected to a larger network? And, just curious, do you make any money from lighting fees?
Connecting to others is simple. What's more difficult is getting inbound connections, ie. others connecting to you. Historically you asked people to connect to you but recently you have https://pool.lightning.engineering/ (integrated into Raspiblitz) with which you can buy incoming connections easily.
> do you make any money from lighting fees?
In short no. I made ~$30 from routing fees in 6 months and spent around the same on on-chain fees (opening/closing channels). It's just an experiment for me (same with bitcoin itself) to see how it all works not something i expect to generate money.
> It presumes there is some other entity with whom you can hold a channel open, who you do roughly equivalent amounts of deposits and withdrawals from.
I don't get how you go from there to "centralised banking".
Contrary to a bank, you do not need to trust this entity with your money. Also it is not centralised, there can be many such entity and they connect together.
> you have to keep closing channels and re-opening new ones, each of which incurs a new transaction fee just like if you did it yourself.
Channel factories will significantly reduce the need to go to the blockchain to open and close channels.
> if you ever lose power or internet then your channel has to be closed and resolved
This is complete non-sense, your channel lives on as long as you don't close it, if you're concerned about counterparty risk, you can use a watchtower.
it's actually worse than that - lightning only works in the context of centralized banking. It presumes there is some other entity with whom you can hold a channel open, who you do roughly equivalent amounts of deposits and withdrawals from. If that criterion is not met, then you have to keep closing channels and re-opening new ones, each of which incurs a new transaction fee just like if you did it yourself. So it is still expensive to send arbitrary transactions, it is just now relatively cheap to do "banking" with a single entity.
That entity sending money for you may still be expensive as well. If they have another entity who they do roughly equal amounts of transactions and withdrawals from then yes, they can nominally transact that for free, but they will still probably charge you for the service, and having that bank send a payment to an arbitrary user with whom they don't have balanced deposits/withdrawals incurs the normal bitcoin transaction fee. You can see where all of this is going - Lightning doesn't really solve anything, it still is only optimized for transactions between large, centralized entities.
Oh, and if you ever lose power or internet then your channel has to be closed and resolved, then reopened if you want to do further business. So you have to pay a transaction fee every time you lose internet (or there is a routing problem somewhere on the net) or power.