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Comment by agorabinary | Hacker News Reader

Every single project I've seen that is looking into Lightning has simply offered lofty promises and roadmaps but without any compelling advantage of Lightning on their coin as opposed to Lightning on Bitcoin. If anything, they have a big hurdle to overcome - Bitcoin's first mover advantage with regards to LN development. PLEASE correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I have seen 99% of off-chain development progress has been Bitcoin/Litecoin, with other coins simply following the progress made and hoping to change a few parameters to make it compatible with their coin.

And the speed difference you mention is an important point - so many of these coins have acted as artificial capacity surrogates during Bitcoin's scaling woes. But with LN, I don't see their use at all...

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They allow faster and cheaper on-chain transactions.

Some prefer to avoid LN if possible, especially as its topology may turn out to be not as p2p as people prefer, and LN nodes may be operated by corporations who may or may not have KYC regulations that people would like to avoid. Besides this, there are general PoS vs PoW differences--some consider PoW an undesirable waste of energy while others consider it a way to secure the network.

I feel the same way about most new coins trying things out. Bitcoin just has to sit and wait for it to show promise (and stability) before integrating it and invalidating that coin's only differentiation.

Even things like smart contracts can be integrated into Bitcoin (I believe the Bitcoin Cash camp is working on this)

The Bitcoin Core developers have been openly been hostile toward the smart contract use case. They even went so far as to change the size limits on Bitcoin's OP_RETURN op code in order to screw over Counterparty one of the original smart contract implementations. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, is on record saying that the whole reason Ethereum exists as a separate thing instead of a system on top of Bitcoin is because of the contempt the Bitcoin Core developers showed toward the smart contract use case.

Bitcoin has RSK (and Szabo)

RSK (RootStock) relies on side chains. Side chains still have unresolved issues before they can be used for real.

That's true, but I merely intended to say that there are plans to introduce smart contracts for Bitcoin, and there is considerable support for this. Naturally, this is intended as a second-layer solution.

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