The paper never refers to hubs, the necessity of a handful of entities routing payments a-la Visa has never been part of the design. There are certainly more connected nodes, but that's true in any P2P system (as well as nodes with higher uptime). Additionally the paper refers to larger blocks, LN doesn't resolve underlying block capacity issues alone, it could help mitigate its problems significantly -- much like how a switched network helps resolve bandwidth (but you still might want faster connections).

I've never argued that it is a dead certainty, certainly less so than you have argued that arbitrarily large blocksizes are the only solution.

Quite frankly, I don't understand why you're so butthurt with my comment, I've stated that I think multiple solutions are best, and have explicitly avoided the politicization with this community.

> I can assure you, the CS understanding of the people who disagree with you (like Chris, Gavin, myself and Satoshi) is just fine

I'm pretty sure your comments don't accurately represents Gavin's view (AFAIK, he also thinks we need to explore many technical approaches), nor do you speak for Satoshi (current understanding of bitcoin's risks is significantly different than 2011).

Engineering costs are one thing, technical impossibilities are another. It's not credibly possible for bitcoin to exist in its current form while also being able to make a $0.0001 payment. I agree there are some aspects to consider, esp with maximizing the social value of the network and testing it out, though. Certainly, for all we know there may be unaccounted issues, but that's the case for bitcoin as well (51% risks are still unknown).

For those who are not paying attention to the bitcoin discussions, I have always stated many transactions will still be on-chain (e.g. large directional flows, but paying $0.001 has not been feasible for a very long time in Bitcoin, LN enables those payments to exist using Bitcoin again).