You're thinking of main chain (which takes 10 minutes for the next block), though I would take a zero-conf transaction in any situation that isn't moving more money than a day's labor. A single confirmation means it made it into the next block which should be plenty for 99% of situations. If you're selling your house, maybe a wait a 2-3 blocks to be sure. Lightning is instant and uses main chain for security but does settlement/transaction data off-chain.

Lightning network is literally a traditional bank transaction mechanism on top of bitcoin.

It's not, you don't need a bank to use it. Banks don't settle instantly, banks have chargebacks, banks required six forms of ID, banks can't reach some places, banks may discriminate. Lightning is Bitcoin. You lock up BTC in a lightning channel, you can then send that BTC to anybody via lightning, and when you close your channel, you get the appropriate amount of BTC back. You can run a lightning node on a phone, a "routing" node on a raspberry pi, it's just as decentralized and trustless as the main chain is. You can open a channel directly w the person you're transacting with or you can forward the transaction through other channels/nodes, all trustlessly, all instantly, all automatically. Nobody ever has custody of the funds aside from you and your intended recipient. There's no central custodian (like a bank) you have to trust.

If you are arguing for using lightning transactions, what is the point of bitcoin in the first place?

Main chain and lightning have different use cases. Use main chain for long-term storage of funds or large transactions. Use lightning for everyday spending. Main chain secures lightning transactions. Main chain is layer one, lightning is layer two, it's possible there will be more layers, just like SMTP is built on TCP which is built on Ethernet or whatever.

fees are huge and will only increase in the future.

Main chain fees are around $1.50 for the next block, which is still cheaper than a bank wire or other equivalent payment methods in many situations. You're right though, they are expected to increase as adoption increases, but lightning has scaled that available blockspace several orders of magnitude. Lightning fees are <1% in almost all instances and aren't expected to increase since they are not tied directly to main chain fees and no mining is required. A lightning transaction uses about as much CPU power as sending an e-mail. A single main chain transaction can open a lightning channel. You can have billions of transactions inside a lightning channel.

[–] Deflaktor 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I apologize, it looked like copy pasta.

You lock up BTC in a lightning channel, you can then send that BTC to anybody via lightning,

You can not send the BTC to just about anybody. Only to people with whom you have a channel open. If you want to send to anybody you need to hop through other channels using middlemen. That sounds very similar to the function of a bank.

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It's fair, I assume a lot of people are bots too, but I like lemmy because it's mostly not bots :).

You can not send the BTC to just about anybody. Only to people with whom you have a channel open. If you want to send to anybody you need to hop through other channels using middlemen. That sounds very similar to the function of a bank.

You are right, if you want to send directly from your wallet to another user's wallet with no middlemen, you need to have a channel open with that user, which you totally can and will save you on fees in the long-term if you transact with that person frequently. But I don't do this because it's un-necessary, you can also send funds to any other person on lightning via these middlemen. The middlemen don't have custody of the funds, they can't block/reverse/do anything with the transaction aside from just forward it along. You can choose who those "middlemen" are, they are usually selected based on the lowest expected fee. They route data around, if they are banks, then so are other Bitcoin nodes you connect to on main chain. But we don't think of them as banks right? They just relay data around and they're decentralized. You are right that they share a similar function of routing payments, the difference is in how they do that and who controls what parts of that process. Banks have immense power over your funds. Lightning nodes you route a payment through have none and anybody can run one.