Very few people truly understand the lightning network and the problems it solves.

Michael Saylor Expressed:  Soon, no Bitcoin wallet or Crypto exchange will be competitive if they don’t support Lightning.

Community Response:  Now, that nations are adopting it as a legal currency all exchanges should support lightning.

Lighting network means centralization, off chain transactions, vulnerabilities and man in the middle. Also you have the “declining block subsidy”. Lighting is not an on chain transaction.

For those who do not understand the lightning network:  Lightning is a decentralized network using smart contract functionality in the blockchain to enable instant payments across a network of participants.

Lightning Network creates a network of two-party ledger entries.  Using these entries it is possible to find a path across the network to reach out to the recipient nodes.  This is a lot similar to routing packets on the internet. The nodes along the path are not trusted.  The payment is enforced by making use of a script that enforces the atomicity, where either the entire payment succeeds or fails via decrementing time-locks.

Lightning Network users the bi-directional payment channels and uses the blockchain as the Arbitrater.

Using blockchain as an arbitrator, it is possible to conduct transactions off-blockchain without limitations.  The transactions can be made off-chain; however, with the confidence of on-blockchain enforceability.

A lot like legal contracts, but one does not go to court each time a contract is made.  Since the transactions and scripts can be broken down in to component parts.  The smart-contract can be enforced on-blockchain. In real-time legal contracts when there is an event of non-cooperation the court gets involved, but with the blockchain, the result is deterministic.

In the bidirectional payment channel, two participants create a ledger entry on the blockchain.  This needs both participants to sign off on any spending of funds. Both of these parties create transactions which refund the ledger entry to their individual allocation; however, they do not broadcast them to the blockchain.  They will be able to update their individual allocations for the ledger entry by creating several transactions spending from the current ledger entry output.

Only the most recent version is valid, which is enforced by blockchain-parsable smart-contract scripting. This entry can be closed out at any time by either party without any trust or custodianship by broadcasting the most recent version to the blockchain.

Participation in the network is dynamic and open to all. Traditional trusted financial systems were vulnerable to monopolies.  There was a need for unilateral custodial ownership of funds. In the lightning network parties need not have unilateral custodial ownership of funds. The payment is dispensed conditional of the knowledge of the embedded secure cryptographic hash.