<i>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).</i><p>This is very clearly not true, and you don&#x27;t do yourself any favours by saying such things. The paper discusses hubs that need to provide various guarantees, like being continuously online and routing payments for arbitrary third parties. This is not at all the same thing as a wallet and Chris is right to point out the distinction.<p>With respect to your point about becoming a punching bag, I&#x27;m afraid I am not particularly sympathetic. When Blockstream started floating LN as an alternative to raising the block size (which is what they have consistently done) you should have condemned that and them right away, loudly and clearly, as it was obviously an absurd suggestion and not going to happen anywhere near in time.<p>LN is a highly theoretical system that doesn&#x27;t have any implementation that ordinary people could actually use. There is no practical experience with running such a network. It doesn&#x27;t even have answers to basic design questions, like how routing and addressing would work. The chance of project failure is therefore quite high, as is always the case for research projects.<p>Thus to imply LN is some sort of dead-cert thing is hubris. Academics have been producing e-cash white papers for decades. Almost none of them actually turned into real-world systems. Nobody will know if LN actually works better than Bitcoin does (or did) until it&#x27;s built and has competitive usability, which is a very long time away.<p><i>&gt; There is a clear obvious misunderstanding of core principles in computer science, wishful thinking does not solve real problems</i><p>That&#x27;s not very charitable is it?<p>I can assure you, the CS understanding of the people who disagree with you (like Chris, Gavin, myself and Satoshi) is just fine, but I have to question your understanding of engineering. The calculations were done years ago that showed for typical payment network loads that global broadcast could work just fine. Computer science doesn&#x27;t mean &quot;some algorithms never work and some always work&quot;. It just gives us the tools to analyse costs. By simply ignoring complexity and engineering costs of LN, as well as some rather tricky algorithmic costs around pathfinding in global non-suspended networks, you can obviously make any actually existing system look bad in favour of a theoretical proposal.