Care to make a counterargument instead of just being dogmatic?
Discussion
The first part doesn't make any sense, why would you be part of the <1% that's avoiding consensus?
The idea of Bitcoin is that there is consensus & you must bend the knee to it - even miners.
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On LN, I can open a payment channel with the peers I do business with & avoid the largest nodes forever & never have to worry about a thing.
If blackrock owned 99%+ of economic LN nodes then the network is dead & we should shoot it in the head & move on to better solutions that promote user decentralization.
If big centralized entities (custodially) 99% of users and capital, they have the power to unilaterally change things.
That's a different premise than what you said about full nodes above,
But like I said,
My OP was exactly saying that any open decentralized protocol can get captured and centralized by big players if we are not careful and let them.
I didn't claim that did or will happen to bitcoin, LN or nostr.
"your node is useless if the largest LN nodes block payments to it" 🚫
It's as useless as a private mail server, if it does not work when mailing/paying 99% of people. That's what capture looks like.
The analogy doesn't work & is leading you to draw some conclusions that I don't think is based on LN but your feelings towards Email.
Surely this time it will be different!
You don't understand the difference between p2p decentralized systems that are self hosted,
Vs.
Client to server systems that are never self hosted.
Never self hosted... now. In the 90s, having your own mail server and website was fairly common. Things change.
Nothing is stopping LN from just being client - server in the future.
Ofc there is.
Not saying it will happen for sure. Hopefully it will not, but it's a reasonable possibility given past historic trends.
I don't think so,
Even if there are big players, they have an incentive to keep their counterparts in check by always keeping consensus.
That consensus always allows me to send you money p2p with our own private channel.
This will always be available to us imho.
They have more incentive to collude between them and make it harder for smaller independent nodes.
Each node on the network is just that, a single node.
The incentive is to keep the network as is, and once established is almost impossible to change due to competitive behaviors.
The problem with centralized services is that there is no good way to interact without it.
With LN there is a good way to interact & it will only get better as the network evolves.