Compared to what kind of payment onboarding system? Outside of free cash, anything related to setting up a bank account, or a credit card can take up to 7-10 business days if not more, post an application to do so. Do you know of any onboarding system of payment that is faster? It seems like this is just a random statement by itself that is not in the context of all the other onboarding mechanisms of every payment system currently used. Care to calibrate Lightening onboarding with any other mass payment system? Even if you use square, paypal, venmo etc, they need to be linked to real checking accounts, credit card, other verified (with long onbaording) payment systems etc.
Furthermore, 2-3% of all transactions on many of these systems are fraudulent, but the payment systems ACCEPT This as an acceptable level of fraud and cover the expenses, in order for faster transactions.
Square knows for example it won't be used in coffee shops over another competitor if Square on average takes 20 seconds longer to process metadata in conjunction with the transaction itself to see if its an attempt/fraudulent charge, so they consciously cut corners here and accept this liability so we can all get coffee 8x a day.
This is why bitcoin has industry standard confirmation blocks so the network can address and blacklist attempts at doubles spends and keep a master chain.
This is basic blockchain 101 compared to standard knowledge of onboarding to every en masse payment system we all anecdotally have experience with layered digital transaction technology and the losses associated with that.
The lightening network is as mentioned above with links, rapidly evolving to expediate this while still maintaining the underlying benefits of transaction consensus that avoids fraud.
You may deal with fraudulent exchanges as you will do with fraud around any new technology (heard of the internet before? there were lots of sites for fraud, and much worse when it came out, and still are, we just all get smarter about what we click, and hopefully in this case, who we throw our money at, which you should be doing anyways for any new technology...) but the fraud here is associated with like top ranked comment said, not the protocol but the flurry of business activity around it, and is really null and void to the technical conversation itself, which is really what evolves communities like this past these handwavy statements...
I really don't mind constructive criticism of blockchain based technologies, but the issue is the conversation rarely evolved because of cargo culting statements like this that ignorethe very benefits of moving to a blockchain based payment system.
> Outside of free cash, anything related to setting up a bank account, or a credit card can take up to 7-10 business days if not more
You are forgetting concurrency. A bank doesn't stop processing transactions for 7 days while opening 1 account. Thousands, millions, or more accounts can be opened concurrently. If account demand skyrockets more branches can be added, more tellers hired, banks can compete on efficiency of service.
Bitcoin's 7 TPS rate limit is global and immutable (without a fork). You cannot add more nodes to satisfy demand. You cannot add more hash power to satisfy demand. You get 7 TPS or you try to get consensus on upgrading (which almost always means a fork, which ironically is an extreme form of fiscal stimulus as it doubles monetary supply).
you don't have to do it in the street...but yes this is true for many exchanges if you are wanting to take an existing currency and turn it into another one, or if exchanges are how you are looking to transfer money, you can also receive btc without ever having bought it, and send it to addresses and never use an exchange.
Regardless, your point only further proves that the bottleneck for onboarding users to lightening en masse is, if a problem at all, not one unique to that network, or any other payment system we currently use.
My point is that since its impractical for most people to use bitcoin without a bank or credit card it's not really a viable alternative since the system it is attempting to subvert is still necessary. If you're an enemy of the state and need to move your money covertly, bitcoin offers some limited utility, but for the vast majority of people it is a waste of time.
You forgot that this initial on boarding transaction is just a tiny step in the complex process you have listed above but this tiny step is already a significant barrier that prevents more than 200 million users to open a channel per year. This is already assuming that those channels never have to settle and no other transactions happen on the blockchain ever.
Furthermore, 2-3% of all transactions on many of these systems are fraudulent, but the payment systems ACCEPT This as an acceptable level of fraud and cover the expenses, in order for faster transactions.
Square knows for example it won't be used in coffee shops over another competitor if Square on average takes 20 seconds longer to process metadata in conjunction with the transaction itself to see if its an attempt/fraudulent charge, so they consciously cut corners here and accept this liability so we can all get coffee 8x a day.
This is why bitcoin has industry standard confirmation blocks so the network can address and blacklist attempts at doubles spends and keep a master chain.
This is basic blockchain 101 compared to standard knowledge of onboarding to every en masse payment system we all anecdotally have experience with layered digital transaction technology and the losses associated with that.
The lightening network is as mentioned above with links, rapidly evolving to expediate this while still maintaining the underlying benefits of transaction consensus that avoids fraud.
You may deal with fraudulent exchanges as you will do with fraud around any new technology (heard of the internet before? there were lots of sites for fraud, and much worse when it came out, and still are, we just all get smarter about what we click, and hopefully in this case, who we throw our money at, which you should be doing anyways for any new technology...) but the fraud here is associated with like top ranked comment said, not the protocol but the flurry of business activity around it, and is really null and void to the technical conversation itself, which is really what evolves communities like this past these handwavy statements...
I really don't mind constructive criticism of blockchain based technologies, but the issue is the conversation rarely evolved because of cargo culting statements like this that ignorethe very benefits of moving to a blockchain based payment system.