Earlier quoted context omitted.
[replying because I previously downvoted and another respondent didn't know why people were downvoting.] > Really? From your description it sounds like I would have to trust Sparkswap and some other unknown bank with my fiat. Fiat transactions have extremely high reversibility often for months after the fact, and law enforcement is actually responsive around fiat theft in a way they haven't been around cryptocurrency…
Readers should now this is one of the main Bitcoin developers behind the "fee market" and in 2017 celebrated $50 fees, caused by his ideas.[0] While being the CTO of Blockstream, a company whose business plan is to create side-chains like LN. By keeping on-chain fees high they managed to artificially create a need for side-chains, which they could fill with LN and recently Liquid. Anyway that's a lot of words to not…
>Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.
At any rate, the rest of your commentary is inaccurate. Lightning channels can go offline and be completely fine. I've had one offline for months before I brought my node back online and everything was fine.
The inbound liquidity issues are being resolved through dual-funded channels, which means both parties of a channel coordinate to start a channel off with the liquidity balanced between them instead of completely on one side.
LN is in fact still in beta, and you should expect bugs like any other beta software. That should come as no surprise.
Lightning is however in a state where it is more or less safe to use. The twitter bot I run that relays Blockstream Satellite transmissions has on order of 3,000 tweets -- which means there have been 3,000 payments with Lightning for just this one service.
Keep in mind Lightning in general is more suited to small amounts given the very cheap fees and divisibility down to 0.00000000001 of a bitcoin.
So to sum it all up, your post is pretty inaccurate.