Here's the Ars Technica deep dive into Bitcoin's Lightning network you've been waiting for. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
I tried to stick to explaining the technology in my Lightning explainer, but here are my predictions for the network.
(1) I think Lightning will probably be a success in the sense that it will shift a lot of routine, small transactions off-chain, easing bitcoin's congestion/transaction fee problems.
(2) I think skeptics like @matthew_d_green are probably right that the network will be dominated by a small number of highly-connected hubs, and that most payment chains will be short.
(3) It's a no-brainer for companies like Coinbase, Bitpay, Overstock, etc. to use Lightning to shuttle funds around on behalf of their mutual customers.
(4) Payment channels seem too complex for the average user to maintain, so most people will probably delegate this to a third party like Coinbase. They'll use Lightning by asking Coinbase to send Lightning payments to third parties on their behalf.
(5) This might seem like the antithesis of the Bitcoin/Lightning vision of building a trustless payment network, but ordinary users don't want that. There's a reason people use Gmail with SSL instead of running their own mail servers and using PGP.
(6) But even if the Lightning/Bitcoin ecosystem comes to be dominated by people using their Coinbase app to buy coffee from Starbucks, the key thing is that people always have the fallback option of running a full lightning node or making old-fashioned on-chain payments.
