Andreas Antonopoulos on Lightning Network without SegWit (my take as a programmer)
We have segwit now since August so while the question is practically moot, this explains why segwit is an important factor in preventing transaction malleability. Without segwit, we would have had to be online to prevent an open channel from closing that cheats users of funds.
I've been hearing that LN will go fully online sometime between 2 months to 2 years. What LN does for transaction speeds is take the vast majority of transactions off chain. It regards the blockchain as a sort of "court system" that resolves differences and since most transactions happen off chain in LN, the blockchain would no longer have a complete record of all transactions. This has important implications for privacy as well.
LN makes it possible to settle transactions using multisig 3rd parties to monitor channels that gives these parties a small cut of any dispute should an attempt to cheat occur.
What I find really interesting about the block size debate is that it's the exchanges that generally want larger blocks. The failure of SegWit2X is actually a move toward greater privacy as well (assuming Lightning Network eventually comes online). Exchanges make more with bigger blocks but they also sacrifice privacy by that move.
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