Thank you. I went to Lugano to find out 'the truth' in other words... how does all this stuff really work? Because there are uh conflicting opinions, from some Stackers much less the crypto community at large which obviously doesn't want Lightning to work because their coin has little purpose at that point.

Lightning in Lugano worked really well. I paid from my own node and the connection was finicky, it took maybe 30 seconds to connect to my own node (this was over TOR on a cellular connection on another continent) but all my payments went through.

When I hear people say that Lightning is 'centralized' I politely want to disagree... because I coinjoined my UTXOs then opened Lightning channels with them. I only needed a few and I was able to pay in another country.

I remember playing that video game Rainbow Six in like 1998-1999 when I was a kid and the connection was terrible, I was playing it on a like... Pentium II LOL. It was really janky and each round was slow to load... and like half the time you never knew what was going on! And 'we' didn't really understand the internet I/we only knew enough for basic functionality and it was wonky.

But it was the beginning and I look at Lightning the same way. It's kinda... slow to load but once you get it up and running it's really cool. I get Zeus notifications on my watch at work when I get an LNAddress Zap I think everyone will want that eventually.

I also paid with Lightning in the Netherlands a few places with my node plus another phone node and everything went through. Everyone is concerned about inflation and debasement well here is a solution