My First Lightning Payment

Today i sent my first Bitcoin Lightning payment, i used the Eclair Android wallet and i purchased a sticker from the Blockstream store ( https://store.blockstream.com ). I must say that the speed and cost of the transaction was fantastic. I paid 6 Satoshis to send $4.99 and the payment was as instant as it could be, i'm very impressed, but......... I'm just not sure how necessary it all is.

I understand that Lightning is in it's very early stages and there is lot's more development to come but just to be able to send one Lightning transaction i first had to send two Bitcoin transactions, one to the eclair wallet, wait an hour, then i had to send another transaction to open the Lightning channel, wait another hour. Now my Lightning channel is funded, i can now enjoy fast and cheap transactions but at some point i will have to fund the channel again so another long and expensive Bitcoin transaction. In the future on boarding with Lightning will have to be the same as all other Cryptocurrencies or what is the point, why do i want to keep sending coins to myself in order to be able to send them to someone else fast and cheap when other Cryptocurrencies already do this.

Believe it or not i am really trying my best not to bash Lightning here because i loved the way it felt to use it, the technology is great but i keep going back to my original issue where i don't see the point. The original issue was scaling, too much data for 1MB blocks. I have worked for numerous companies in the past and when our data and traffic increased we then as a solution would increase server capacity etc. I just seems like the most logical and simplist thing to do. Lightning just seems to be an extreamly elaborate way to solve a problem that doesn't really exist when you can just progressively increase capacity as required. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has been doing this since it's fork and it seems to be working just fine for them.

Bitcoin Cash is using 8MB block and are upgrading to 32MB blocks on 15th May. The only draw back with bigger blocks seems to be centralised mining but to be honest i have been in Bitcoin for around 3 years and it's always been centralised for me, the regular Joe cannot make much money without a huge business like investment at which point it is centralised as far as i am concerned. While Lightning is instant, Bitcoin Cash has 0-Conf which is basically (for the regular user) the same. And don't forget Bitcoin Cash does all this on-chain.

I'm looking forward to future development of Lightning, like i said i do like the tech i just don't know why it exists, maybe future development will change that.