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.
