>https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

>Chapter 3.1.4 Commitment Transactions: Ascribing Blame

>Penalties for contract violations can only be enforced "if one is able to ascribe blame for broadcasting an old transaction."

>Broadcasting transactions takes place on the BC, so identifying an old transaction is only possible by finding it on the BC.

>The same is true for revocable commitment transactions. Both parties must observe the BC at all times in order to know whether the other party did indeed violate the contract by broadcasting a transaction. Contract violations cannot be detected otherwise.

I'm not really clear how your source contradicts mine. The source you provided is talking about how to ascribe blame, but then you magically turned it around to talk about having to be online 24/7? I'm not following the logic there.

>Out here in The Real World(tm) I find the opposite to be the case. I cannot think of a situation in which I want to make a payment that requires me to be online. Neither my debit card, nor my credit card, and especially not cash has such requirement. I can buy petrol, groceries, clothes, pay the barber, eat at a restaurant, have a drink at a bar, pay admission for a ball game, etc. etc. all without being online.

1. always-online mobile payment systems (eg. alipay/wechat) are quite successful in asia. while I agree being able to pay without internet access is great, internet access requirement isn't some sort of insurmountable barrier.

2. you do realize that even though the credit card doesn't require internet access, the terminal itself does? Also, payment terminals has bidirectional communication with the card via NFC. It's not hard to imagine some sort of NFC based protocol that allows limited information to be communicated between the terminal and the wallet software on your phone, so it can gather the requisite information to make the transaction.

>>>And of course that 3rd party is totally trustworthy for some reason and offers their service for free?

>>You're making it sound like it's an issue, but I'm not seeing it. Thousands of hobbyists run bitcoin nodes for free, which costs storage and bandwidth.

>That's orthogonal to the problem of Lightning network routing fees. It doesn't matter who operates a node and how. What matters is that unless you open a bi-directional payment channel, you'll route transactions through intermediaries that will take fees.

Are you losing track of the thread, or are you trying to move the goalposts? We were previously talking about how watchtowers would be operated/funded, now you're talking about how transaction fees for intermediary nodes?

>I think you missed something here. Lightning isn't a single centralised implementation.

As it relates to scrutiny, how is an issue? Unless there's some fatal flaw with the protocol itself, you should be secure against loss of money, even if the peer was malicious. This is different than difi-project-of-the-day that have one implementation and one protocol (the two are essentially the same thing in ethereum).

>Routing also requires keys to held online for intermediary nodes for latency reasons, which is another considerable risk since unlike with banking, there's neither oversight nor security regulations in place.

What's your objection here? That you can get hacked, or that your intermediaries can get hacked and somehow cause you to lose money?

>you'll quickly notice that a lot of Lightning's mechanisms are built on trust in scripts

yes, that's how cryptocurrencies are supposed to work - trust in systems rather than trust in people. Which is better has already been debated to death so I'm not interested in discussing that again here.