Some commenters here appear to be asking why one should favour LN over raising the block size.
The answer to that is that it's not a dichotomy.
There's not a decision to be made _between_ 'LN' and 'Raise block size'. They're two independent things. The LN is an opt-in system on top of bitcoin.
If we're lucky, LN works out well.
If it doesn't - I'd be in favour of keeping the blocksize low anyway and I think a lot of technical folk would too. The reason why I don't think is difficult to understand, rather it's difficult to accept.
Raising the block size beyond some value is problematic. A small increase is likely safe, but we really don't know what. This is both in order for full nodes to be usable on reasonable hardware, and also to ensure fee pressure (in a low/zero fee environment, inflation will likely have to be introduced to ensure enough mining happens for security).
A good analogy might be with cars and cities. Imagine we lived in a world where public transport simply couldn't exist - for whatever reason it's just impossible. Would it be prudent then to bulldoze the streets of London, Paris, wherever else, to build more roads for capacity? I would argue not - you simply have a situation in which there's a limit on capacity and that's that.
In addition, in the world where pub transport _does_ exist, investing in trains does not necessarily mean completely stopping work on roads entirely. They're different things.
The answer to that is that it's not a dichotomy.
There's not a decision to be made _between_ 'LN' and 'Raise block size'. They're two independent things. The LN is an opt-in system on top of bitcoin.
If we're lucky, LN works out well.
If it doesn't - I'd be in favour of keeping the blocksize low anyway and I think a lot of technical folk would too. The reason why I don't think is difficult to understand, rather it's difficult to accept.
Raising the block size beyond some value is problematic. A small increase is likely safe, but we really don't know what. This is both in order for full nodes to be usable on reasonable hardware, and also to ensure fee pressure (in a low/zero fee environment, inflation will likely have to be introduced to ensure enough mining happens for security).
A good analogy might be with cars and cities. Imagine we lived in a world where public transport simply couldn't exist - for whatever reason it's just impossible. Would it be prudent then to bulldoze the streets of London, Paris, wherever else, to build more roads for capacity? I would argue not - you simply have a situation in which there's a limit on capacity and that's that.
In addition, in the world where pub transport _does_ exist, investing in trains does not necessarily mean completely stopping work on roads entirely. They're different things.