I spent quite some time reading about lightning. It is a fabulous system. Ad-hoc establishment of cryptographically secured payment routes is non-trivial, to say the least. I can imagine that the network will grow 1000x over the following years (and so will channel opening costs). So for people who have an interest in working on censorship-free and open payment rails for everybody who wants to use it: now is a good time to start (I know we can't have 8 bn lightning channels - not worried about that).