Bitcoin could have achieved that goal if it had been allowed to scale. Monero uses a dynamic block size so will be able to achieve the transaction throughput if usage reaches that level. Transaction fees on Monero however are limited to a few tiers in order to make it more difficult to deanonymize transactions by fee size, so without a fork in the future (which is a normal occurrence on Monero) the fees will remain higher than Visa.
> Connect to a node that processes a million dollars worth of transactions per day
Your solution is to centralized transactions on a few large payment processor nodes?
The core problem of LN remains, which is that in order to operate a LN node you must keep it always online or risk having your coins stolen. The entire point of creating a L2 network in the first place was because Bitcoin Core decided that scaling the base layer with larger blocks would harm decentralization by making it more difficult to operate a Bitcoin node. Well anyone who has ever operated a server can tell you that maintaining near 100% uptime is a much much higher technical bar than buying a larger hard drive.
The alternative for LN users if they don't want to operate their own LN node is to give up custody of their coins to someone who does operate a node, but this goes against the core premise of cryptocurrencies.
You are never _guaranteed_ to win a race against honest block producers for any finite time horizon, even if you owned 99% of all hashing power.
A double spend via 51% isn't really feasible anyway. A double spend attack, in the simplest case, is to:
1. Pay for good or services
2. Receive delivery of the goods or services
3. Invalidate the original payment once the goods or services are no longer revokable.
For a double spend to be worthwhile the value of the scam must exceed the cost of the scam. Maintaining >50% hashing power is extremely expensive and is more and more expensive the longer you maintain it. Therefore the value of the scam must also be extremely large. For crypto transactions it's common sense to wait for more and more confirmations (additional blocks mined after the block containing the transaction) before delivering the goods or services as the size of the transaction grows. Since it's trivial to wait for N+1 confirmations as the seller of goods or services it's trivial to defend against double spends for any meaningful amount of money.
If they are already collaborating with these companies then why not just have them agree to allow access to their APIs and avoid all the wasteful AI agent middleware shit?
