Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not a thing. Bitcoin transactions can easily cost tens of dollars each, and Lightning balances are ultimately settled via Bitcoin.
Which, incidentally, is why it's the blockchain with the second highest number of users. Basically free and instant transactions enables seamless integration with the web.
Payment channels are a little complex so it's common for people to not understand them, but they do indeed solve this problem completely.
In EU there are also free and instant bank transfers.
CC payments can be reversed though (which is a cons in my mind, I don't understand why merchants should lose the money by default in case of a dispute).
Sellers can price in and insure themselves against fraud. The protections offered by CCs are that insurance for consumers.
While the 2nd part of your statement is on the surface true, it misses the point. You can gets hundreds of thousands of transactions out of a channel without ever closing it. Batching on-chain transactions is now easier than ever so you can close and rebalance hundreds of channels cheaply. You can very easily do automatic swaps between onchain and lightning channel balances. You can be the counter party to either side of these transactions depending on if you need inbound or outbound channel liquidity. These transactions can also be easily batched allowing you to unlock liquidity where you need it for a fraction of the price of a single spend bitcoin transaction.
There is still a long way to go to scale bitcoin to billions of users while keeping the blockchain accessible to all.
For further interesting scaling solutions in the works checkout.
- cross input signature aggregation: A way to super charge batching. - channel factories: a way for a lightning channel to be trustlessly owned by multiple parties. - MuSig: multisig that is indistinguishable from a single signer transaction. - federated chaumian mints: a way to do privacy preserving custodial wallets. - drive chains/space chains: a bitcoin merged mined side chain. - eltoo: new lightning channel upgrade that cuts the space complexity of channels from O(n) to O(1). - covenants congestion control: allows a sender to commit to spend while the receiver gets to choose when to receiver. Exchange withdrawals during high demand times while a customer can wait for a lower demand time to fully receive the coins.
Happy to answer any questions on these.
