That's about my own conclusion on both.
Discussion
well, give me dangerous but low trust (with the max penalty of onchain force closure and wait) any day over high trust ruggable ecrap
a year ago there was 5000btc of channels, and now it's probably more like 6-7000 and those channels can transit payments at 50% of their volume on average at least minimally speaking every hour
i don't like roasbeef but the rest of the guys who invented it are awesome, antonopolous was one of the trio, if you know who that guy is
ecash is no solution for the problem, it's 1983 technology, lightning is 2017 technology, built with the understanding of what a crapfest ecash is
anyone who is promoting ecash as better than lightning is a LIAR and anyone who thinks that ecash is equal to lightning simply doesn't understand the vast gulf of difference between the two
I don't think anyone says any of this... It is possible for old technologies to gain new utility with the invention of new technologies. It's not a competition.
But it also isn't a simplification or a move to pseudonymity for payments, and that isn't something that I prefer to see in any money transmission tech.
lightning uses onion routing to forward payments, did you know that?
https://github.com/indra-labs/indranet is my own work and an attempt to basically build out a whole anonymised pay-for-traffic scheme BASED ON what lightning does with payments
i would very much like to be able to finish that project
Most people prefer to transmit money without having to tie up more than double the amount of the money for liquidity constraints. Also eCash can be completely private within a mint.
Again, not a competition.
fiat incentives drive the aversion to saving
that was a key element of Keynes system that all modern governments and banks run on
it simply does not apply to bitcoin
i am happy to tie up quite an amount of my surplus funds that i will use in future to make payments
it's not a black and white thing, and you'd know this if you actually used it
the only hard part of it is some channel partners are shit, and they cost you force closes, that is like, 1% cost, at worst, the whole thing is your funds are liquid, you can drain all your channels out in minutes if you need to pay something big out of your channel liquidity
and when you have money again, you can atomic swap it back in and done
"tying money up" in stake is not the same thing as opening channels
you can spend your balance down on the channel as soon as it is open
I don't want to tie up an asset and get rugged. I hate pretty much everything about lightning.
losing use of the money for a time is far less than losing the money
it's a foundational technology for scaling and what is stupid about hating on it is that onchain is not an alternative, not for point of sale, not for micropayments
there will likely be more alternatives that help fill out the space but ecash is simply just custodial with one extra step, it's not an advance it's a regression