Lightning Network Skepticism
&gt; It seems I wasn’t the only one with this concern as there’s been a fairly recent pivot away from the hub-and-spoke network topology to a more organic, wallet-to-wallet routing. The network is now envisioned as a more pure p2p payment layer without those large scale payment hubs.<p>As the co-author of the Lightning Network, this is not true, there has been no pivot. The design has always designed around wallet-wallet topologies from the beginning (try doing a Find for the word &quot;hub&quot; in the paper). Will there be nodes more connected than others? Of course. But with LN, they are designed to be interchangeable and formless. It may look like other P2P topologies of ever-shifting &quot;supernodes&quot;, but never irreplaceable &quot;hubs&quot; like Visa or Fedex&#x27;s single primary Memphis, TN hub -- in fact you&#x27;d be challenged to find a P2P network with a topology of only a handful of static hubs (this makes sense because establishing connectivity is cheap in a virtual system, opposed to physical infrastructure like wires or an airport).<p>I&#x27;m not particularly happy that &quot;small-block skeptics&quot; are using LN as some kind of punching bag against their pet ideas of who the enemies are (the arguments have become highly politicized in the bitcoin community). The LN paper itself presumes bigger blocks, and have never argued that LN is the sole solution, merely that a large component of scalability needs to occur via moving transactions off-chain. The alternatives are a failure of mining incentives (whether it be low-value transactions get crowded off bitcoin and moves to a bitcoin-backed centralized ledger, or the fee-market breaks down and miners reduce fees far too low due to commons externalities).<p>There is a clear obvious misunderstanding of core principles in computer science, wishful thinking does not solve real problems. It is is akin to assuming that systems are easily capable of a broadcast topology -- that everyone in the world can be on the same wifi access point. Bigger block capacity is desirable, but it&#x27;s also desirable to be able to instantly transact a payment of $0.0001 without everyone in the world processing that payment.<p>(I&#x27;m going to be intermittent with computer access today due to the holidays but I will reply to email or respond tomorrow :P)