Jesus, not this bullshit again. It's not vaporware IF YOU CAN USE IT ALREADY. It's already available for you to use on Litecoin. Lightning works, it just needs the services to become user friendly now.
It's not whether Lightning works or not. We all know it's technically possible to send value using the Lightning Network protocol.
What remains unknown, however, is whether this form of clearing network will be sufficient to scale Bitcoin payment processing to a sufficient degree. This is yet to be determined. In other words: can LN support a billion users doing ~50k TPS while keeping fees per payment at or below VISA fees?
The Lightning Network is not a solution that allows scaling Bitcoin payments to an arbitrary high throughput and arbitrarily low payment fee. LN has a limit on throughput and a minimum bound on average fee, and what that is for a LN network with N payers and M payees we simply don't know yet. For example: what will the maximum throughput, and average fee, of an LN network with 10 million payers and 10 thousand payees be?
I think you are just a few steps too ahead. We aren't at billion users just yet but needs a solution in the near future and scaling to billion users can be discussed a little later.
The thing to realize is that right now, there isn't a scaling problem at all. There is one group of people doing everything they can to make sure that the block size limit is not increased, including censoring /r/bitcoin, posting non-stop with irrelevant and misleading information, making and breaking promises, etc. If the block size limit was lifted to 8MB, nothing would happen, everything would function exactly the same.
There is no technical reason for the limitation, no limits of bottlenecks have been reached now that the blocks are full and anyone could see that bitcoin as it stands takes very little CPU power and very little bandwidth to sync with the chain. If you can watch a stream on twitch or youtube, you can sync with bitcoin's chain with lots of bandwidth to spare.
That isn't a scaling problem and is a false dichotomy. A scaling problem would be if putting the max block size cap higher than it is now caused network problems.
Seeing that there is trivial resource usage currently and that the 1MB block size limit was chosen arbitrarily, that seems incredibly unlikely.
When I say there isn't a scaling problem and you say 'there has to be something to stop spam' these two things are not mutually exclusive. The fact that you haven't distinguished between one or the other is why FUD and propaganda works so well with bitcoin at this stage.
