>I don't live in Asia.

The point is that always-online payments works. At most the problem you described is a minor annoyance.

>I don't care about the payment processor's requirements.

But you otherwise don't have any objections if we can come up with a NFC protocol that allows an offline phone to make lightning network transactions?

>No, I'm not moving goal posts. You said that hobbyists are running nodes, I say so what? That has zero to do with transaction fees.

1. "hobbyists are running nodes" were in reply to the question of who is going to be running watchtowers. You sneakily switching to a separate topic (transaction fees) as a reply to that is moving the goalposts.

2. what's wrong with intermediaries taking fees? Credit cards have fees. Debit cards have fees. ACH has fees. Cash has fees (resulting from costs associated with handling it)

>> 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.

>The protocol itself explicitly does not protect you against loss of money - it can't. It has to rely on trust in intermediaries and software trying to give security guarantees that the protocol itself cannot provide (hence the need to monitor the BC).

My original point was relating to having to trust peers. As long as you do your part correctly, ie. keeping your keys secure and checking every two weeks (or getting someone to do it for you) if you have channels open, then you don't have to trust them. I agree the requirements are more onerous than on-chain transactions, but I never claimed they weren't, and I think it's a fair trade-off to make for the benefits.

>The issue is that the intermediary is inherently insecure (and shouldn't be trusted by design) and in contrast to the regulated finance industry

The same "regulated finance industry" that allows you to withdraw money from your account with just your account numbers, and it's up to you to wrestle with bureaucracy to get it reversed? If that doesn't count as "inherently insecure" to you I don't know what is.

>there's nothing protecting customers from fraudulent or extortive behaviour of 3rd parties. Manipulated routes (no hacking required) can lead to increased fees or delays without any transparency or protection for users.

1. As opposed to "increased fees or delays" in the form of ATM fees (just one example) that are present in the "regulated finance industry"?

2. With regards to the problem of suboptimal/"extortive" routes. Is this an theoretical problem or a practical one? Are lightning users getting scammed left and right by these malicious peers? If it's free money and as easy as you make it out to be, such attacks should be very popular.

>You might find that acceptable as The System is a sufficient safeguard, but even the Lightning team admits that there are unsolved problems (i.e. monitoring of the BC is required to mitigate these flaws, which brings us back to initial point).

The "unsolved problem" of having to monitor the blockchain every two weeks means... what? The whole project is DOA? That we shouldn't use it? That we should use sink the whole thing and go back to "regulated finance industry"? Is the internet DOA because of the "unsolved problem" that you need to keep your system up to date and patched to not get hacked?