On the scalability issues of onboarding millions of LN mobile clients

In a recent discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Antoine Riard raised a concern about the trust-minimization of Bitcoin's security model. He suggested that Lightning Network (LN) might shift the current paradigm where users need to run a full node by providing fast, affordable, confidential, censorship-resistant payment services. However, Luke Dashjr responded by stating that this paradigm cannot be shifted as it would compromise Bitcoin's security which depends on the assumption that a supermajority of the economy verifies their incoming transactions using their own full node.Luke argued that there have been severe regressions in the number of full nodes which could lead to Bitcoin's failure if not improved. Therefore, efforts to improve the "full node-less" experience should be avoided. While BIP 157 improves privacy of full-node-less usage, it provides no real benefits to full node users compared to more efficient protocols like Stratum/Electrum. For this reason, Luke and a few others oppose merging support for BIP 157 in Core.Antoine had suggested that requiring a full-node for LN adoption could deprive many users, especially those who are already denied real financial infrastructure access. However, Luke argued that if Bitcoin becomes insecure itself, it cannot solve any problem. Therefore, maintaining the supermajority of the economy verifying their incoming transactions using their own full node is crucial for ensuring Bitcoin's security. For further reading, Nicolas Dorier has written two articles explaining why he does not celebrate neutrino and why he believes that neutrino is dangerous for his self-sovereignty.