Mathematical Proof That the Lightning Network Cannot Be a Decentralized Bitcoin Scaling Solution
"Have you heard of the Bitcoin Lightning Network? It is a proposal that claims that:
“using a network of these micropayment channels, Bitcoin can scale to billions of transactions per day”
What it doesn’t tell you is that this can only be accomplished by using large, centralized “banking” hubs.
Many in the Bitcoin community mistakenly assumed or were led to believe that the Lightning Network (LN) would be a distributed peer-to-peer network.
However, this is infeasible. In fact, even using a generous set of assumptions, we will prove it is mathematically impossible."