What does HackerNews think of lightning?

The Lightning Network is decentralised because it is trustless and permissionless. Anyone can send Bitcoins instantly and almost for free. Check out the code to convince yourself.

https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning

Sure.

- Onion Routing Protocol: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/maste...

- P2P Node and Channel Discovery https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/maste...

This repo contains specs for a lot of parts of the LN, although probably there may be changes I imagine.

As for code, one of the implementations, LND (Go): https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/tree/master/routing but there are at least 3 other implementations in the works.

https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning (clang) https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair (Scala) https://github.com/mit-dci/lit (Go)

I'm not sure if you're trying to imply that Lightning Network is vaporware, but there are currently three implementations that pass the integration tests:

https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair https://cdecker.github.io/lightning-integration/

That is a very pessimistic view on the current state of LN. There are three independent open-source LN implementations [1, 2, 3] out there that are being worked on and already implement basic functionality. All three contribute to an document, called Basics Of The Lightning Network (BOLT) [4], which forms an open standard for LN.

I wouldn't call it vaporware. Yes, there are unsurprisingly open questions. But nothing which can't be solved.

1: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd 2: https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair 3: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning 4: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc

> [..] there is no 'payment layer' on top of it, only pie-in-the-sky designs.

That is completely false. Development of Lightning Network and other solutions by multiple teams has been steady and robust. To cite a few working on LN:

* https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning

* https://github.com/acquia/lightning

* https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd

Lightning implementations exist and are fairly usable (although I've found there is some disagreement on e.g. public key format for peers). Check out the following:

* Lit: https://github.com/mit-dci/lit * Eclair: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.acinq.eclai... * lnd: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd * lightning-c: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning

Do these projects have the nicest UX? No. Is it fairly trivial to hook up a shiny UI to their RPC interfaces? Yes.

It's going to take a bit to roll out the infrastructure necessary, but a 1.7 MB block size is good enough until then. Especially if miners stop using ASICBOOST and mining near-empty blocks.