But LN is more productive in an interconnected economy
Let me take your own example to the extreme case and let's assume every entity in the world has a channel opened to only one gateway.
e e e
\ | /
gateway
/ | \
e e e
With this topology, only this gateway has its bitcoin "locked" but earn fees routing, everybody else is free to move their bitcoin to whoever they want, as long as the gateway has enough bitcoins "locked" with the receiver. But keep in mind that the gateway can move x100 the volume of bitcoins they have locked, because money moves back and forth
I think a more decentralized topology, where most entities are gateways too, will have less bitcoins "locked", but I don't know by how much, 30% less?, 70%?, 95%?, I'm not sure, but I think it's probably better than last scenario.
Nevertheless, no matter how good the LN gets, its inevitable that some bitcoins will indeed get locked, when any gateway spends all of its bitcoins then everybody else connected to that gateway cannot route payments through it, and unless they intend to pay directly to the "bankrupted" gateway, those bitcoins are indeed locked.
I think no matter the scenario, LN reduces the need to transact onchain, and the better interconnected the economy is with the LN, more effective it is at doing so. So I think a better metric to follow is the #-of-onchain-bytes that were saved thanks to the LN
Another thing to point out is that we are talking about the LN that is deployed today, we haven't taken into account future improvements that might come, like multiparty channels.
I think the serious technical problems that the LN really has today, is that it's not that robust for gateways, I've heard it has DoS weaknesses, and privacy issues, and I'm not sure how solvable some of them are if the topology becomes centralized with just a few gateways
But LN is more productive in an interconnected economy
Let me take your own example to the extreme case and let's assume every entity in the world has a channel opened to only one gateway.
With this topology, only this gateway has its bitcoin "locked" but earn fees routing, everybody else is free to move their bitcoin to whoever they want, as long as the gateway has enough bitcoins "locked" with the receiver. But keep in mind that the gateway can move x100 the volume of bitcoins they have locked, because money moves back and forthI think a more decentralized topology, where most entities are gateways too, will have less bitcoins "locked", but I don't know by how much, 30% less?, 70%?, 95%?, I'm not sure, but I think it's probably better than last scenario.
Nevertheless, no matter how good the LN gets, its inevitable that some bitcoins will indeed get locked, when any gateway spends all of its bitcoins then everybody else connected to that gateway cannot route payments through it, and unless they intend to pay directly to the "bankrupted" gateway, those bitcoins are indeed locked.
I think no matter the scenario, LN reduces the need to transact onchain, and the better interconnected the economy is with the LN, more effective it is at doing so. So I think a better metric to follow is the #-of-onchain-bytes that were saved thanks to the LN
Another thing to point out is that we are talking about the LN that is deployed today, we haven't taken into account future improvements that might come, like multiparty channels.
I think the serious technical problems that the LN really has today, is that it's not that robust for gateways, I've heard it has DoS weaknesses, and privacy issues, and I'm not sure how solvable some of them are if the topology becomes centralized with just a few gateways