It just seems to me like it allows you to open a secure high speed channel with someone you expect to transact with frequently. That's interesting but most people transact with different people constantly - so unless I want to have an open channel that closes nightly/weekly/monthly with every store I shop at, wouldn't I use a centralized service?

How would that be different than opening an account with Paypal, and everyone you transact with also having a Paypal account, and you all using Paypal to send money between each other, and occasionally Paypal sending money to your real bank account?

EDIT:

I suppose I could just have a channel with every party I transact with that closes monthly (like a credit card), but the lack of reversals mean I would like a centralized service to be able to buffer my money from other parties, like my current credit card offers

It's a p2p mesh network. Lots of people open channels to lots of other people, payments are routed over the network.

Hmm so I have a channel with Target, Target has a channel with my neighbor, and my neighbor has a channel with my cousin.

You're saying I could send money to my cousin and Target and my neighbor would take some sort of cut if they agree to process the transaction?

How do they prevent double spend? What if I have that network, and also a channel with Walmart, and I send all my money to Walmart at the same time I send it all to my cousin, and they give me a sofa

In <some_time_period>'s time when everyone closes the channels, my cousin will have my money, Walmart won't have my money, and I have a sofa.

Am I understanding this correctly?

EDIT: Oh, I see, my coins get locked in the process, so I couldn’t have a separate channel with all of my coins with Walmart. They would have to have a channel with Target, and I assume a good chunk of people in the mesh would have to validate every transaction to prevent double spend. So it’s not totally broken, it just scales poorly as the size of the mesh network grows?

To service the needs of an entity like target which may have a channel with everyone at the same time, I still think a centralized company will emerge to take on the processing with an intermediate hot wallet, instead of a lightning mesh.

But thanks for helping me understand lightning!

Why you are posting so much about something you really don’t understand at all?

I was posting to understand, and people helped me

You sure started out pretty confident. I’m very interested in the intense emotional reactions to crypto currency technology, either immediately dismissive or extreme passion not based on facts.

What you described is a channel inside the network of nodes. What's great in lightning network is that you can route paths / a flow inside the network made of those channels that you just described trustlessly (not trusting the intermediate nodes either) using some simple but ingeniously designed smart contracts.