I don't understand how you arrive at this seven dollar figure. Right now a median fee is 3-4 satoshi's per byte resulting in a typical transaction cost of about $0.64 usd. Here is a site that shows the live fee spread: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),...

It will definitely use lightning, and 99% chance it will be a custodial version no different in actual execution to venmo or paypal, as this is exactly what the present solution du jour there has been (strike in custodial mode) specifically to address the underlying fact that without such a config, lightning doesn't really work. (routability of payments scaling based on size sucks, inbound transfers suck, you need to run your own full node which most regular end users are flatly not going to do)

In terms of that obviously negating any of the original promises of cryptocurrency in terms of censorship resistance, financial sovereignty, be your own bank, audit the state of the ledger upon which everybody is actively transacting, etc, yes, of course, that's the entire point of the hijack and sabotage of BTC.

But over the lightning network it will be close to free

They'd still have to open 6M channels which would create the same number of transactions on the Bitcoin Blockchain

This doesn't seem factually accurate. Please support this claim with more information and preferably a citation. This isn't how LN works to my knowledge.

What I said is factually accurate. It's mentioned on the homepage of the lightning network website in the "How it Works" section. Why would you challenge my statement when you haven't even read the basic information?

https://lightning.network/

Because you left out some information. These channels only have to be opened once, and at current prices this is around 40 cents. It costs a lot more to both open a bank account and send money from a -> b.

If you need to open up 6 million channels it will create approximately a month worth of transactions at the current rate and will significantly push up the transaction fee.

While tx fees are pretty volatile, I see about 3$ (65 sats/vB) to get into the next block (even looking back to when you wrote this) and <1$ if you’re ok with waiting an hour or so.

As has been said before on almost every thread about this, lightning network alleviates the issue of high transaction costs for small transactions.

https://www.coindesk.com/strike-launches-bitcoin-lightning-p...

Lightning network helps repeated small transactions between the same pair.

However, the first transaction between a specific pair (channel opening) still needs to occur on-chain. That transaction still pays a full fee.

You can route through your pair. Say A has a channel with B, B has a channel with C and C has a channel with D, you can make payment between A and D provided that B and C are online. In a way that nobody can steal money from one another, and neither B not D know who is paying who. In practice, B and C would probably be like banks or exchanges, with many channels, while normal users only need one channel open.

True, and in fact lightning payments tend to take many hops if routed publically.

But every citizen would still need atleast one lightning channel. And opening those is expensive.

The lightning channel would go through a custodial wallet. Yes, people could self host their own wallets, but fees would be higher because they'd have to open a lightning channel.

So you need something centralized for it to actually work.

No, why? It's all P2P.

How secure is it compared to real transactions?

There are risks, you need to remain online to catch your counter-party cheating. There are ways to outsource this to so-called watchtowers. This can generally be done privately, and the watchtowers generally get to take at least some of the cheater's money.

I haven't heard of any successful malicious channel theft. I have read quite a few stories of people losing local data making it much harder to recover the money in the channel.

As far as I know you have to be on the internet at least once in 30 days, so it's good only for hot wallets. Also for payments over $1k probably right now Bitcoin transaction is more practical (I have heard of $100k lightning transactions though).