I would say it's pretty encouraging since it barely works, doesn't deliver on any of its promises and much more convoluted to use that normal crypto-currency.
Bitcoin progress has always consisted of overcoming allegedly insurmountable problems, Lightning dev is no different. Next up is solving efficient routing and intermittent nodes.
Bitcoin's founder solved one allegedly insurmountable problem: the Byzantine Generals' problem. It's irrational to believe this means Bitcoin Core's development team, who had no part in the original design of Bitcoin, will solve more problems of this class.
Bitcoin Core should have fully exploited the existing breakthrough in decentralized consensus, by simply raising the block size limit to provide enough space for the world to use Bitcoin, instead of pushing Bitcoin's luck, and premising its success on an uncertain technology like LN.
If you really think that big blocks solve anything, then by all means just use Bcash - though of course Bcash itself is melting down into separate forks as we speak..
Try to look beyond all the censored /r/bitcoin propaganda - bitcoin cash and other cryptocurrencies scale fine with increased blocksizes.
Bitcoin cash is not melting down in separate forks at all. The increased blocksize obviously works without problems and has nothing to do with forking in the first place.
There was never a reason to restrict the blocksize of btc except to sell a complicated and unnecessary promise of a solution to a non-problem. Everyone outside of the /r/bitcoin censorship and propaganda bubble can see this.
Skeptics have thus far been proven right that LN doesn't work as a full substitute for on-chain transactions, and its advocates have continually had to push back the promised date of a usable product.
Big blocks in an age of 30 Mb/s internet connections can and will work. 3,000 tps on-chain was the original scaling plan for Bitcoin. Fortunately, Bitcoin (Cash) carries on that plan.
Except when you settle the transactions where you will pay possibly very large fees.
> anonymously
Nope.
> without any need to wait for block confirmations
0-conf is fine for all but the very largest purchases using simple heuristics.
> And all of this works right now on mainnet?
No it's not release ready yet. Did you ignore all the "you may lose funds" warnings?
> Next up is solving efficient routing
Yeah good luck with that... Solving decentralized routing in an adversarial environment is a much harder problem than scaling Bitcoin. Leaving such a detail is idiotic, especially since there's still no idea how to do it.
Also you forgot watchtowers (since you need to be always online to receive funds or you'll get defrauded). Yes that's online with your wallet...