I don't view LN as having anything to do with bitcoin because it all happened off chain. The benefit of the consensus protocol is lost entirely since consensus is only reached once LN transaction chains are sent back to the bitcoin network and eventually make it into the blockchain. LN transactions rely on am entirely different network of transactions, validators, and (de)centralization tactics.
What are the benefits you see in LN that are worth the tradeoffs of abandoning bicoin's main chain consensus protocol?
The main chain is not abandoned, it’s used as a settlement layer.
If I hand you a paper bitcoin wallet worth a certain amount of satoshis, that’s still bitcoin. You rightly shouldn’t accept it because I know the private key and could rugpull those funds from your control. If there were cryptographic assurance to prevent that rugpull, owning that key becomes as valuable as the underlying asset.
Your flawed explanation is like saying the dollars spent on a Visa card aren’t using US currency because the transaction isn’t immediately settled in the eyes of central banks.
Edit: To be clear, there’s no credit involved in the LN transaction. I only used the analogy as a layman’s example. All LN transactions are fully collateralized and can be settled to the base layer at any time by either participant.
Upon re-reading this I think I identified the gap in your mental model:
There’s no such thing as “LN transaction chains.”
Every LN transaction is literally a bitcoin transaction. Usually these are not broadcast to peers for settlement on the base layer, but the latest transaction always can be broadcast, just like any other Bitcoin transaction.
I don’t follow other L2s closely, so maybe this differs from Ethereum and its derivatives. But the Bitcoin Lightning Network is 100% Bitcoin.
What are the benefits you see in LN that are worth the tradeoffs of abandoning bicoin's main chain consensus protocol?