and then Greg with one i hadn't heard of before; a diversionary argument about how "the signatures for lightning (HTLC) transactions are
smaller than the average on the network right now". i had to go quickly do some reading on HTLC's as i haven't studied the LN in great detail. note my answer to which i haven't gotten a response from Greg yet so i presume i'm right.
@Dusty might want to confirm my assumption:
If you mean this passage:
HTLC tx's are only used once inside the channel, correct? the multisigs required to open and close the channel are in fact larger than regular tx's and are what is subject to the discount, no?
I think you are right.
and you've also been told LN tx's are simply bitcoin tx's.
Yes, they are bitcoin transactions, but they are not so
simple 
What problem do you have with that?
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LN mostly rely on unconfirmed transactions in memory pool, if those unconfirmed transactions can be replaced at ease(malleability), then LN will never work
Malleability is completely transversal to double spending. Double spending is possible since day 0 of bitcoin, and that's why we usually wait some confirmations on a tx.
IMO, smart contract is a concept ahead of its time. In principle, a string of numbers on blockchain can be used to represent any physical/virtual objects, the problem is that how do you enforce this relationship?
Smart contracts are not related to physical/virtual objects. Smart contracts is a script to redeem a transaction. A multisig tx is a very simple kind of smart contract. A tx with a locktime is another simple kind of smart contract. The bitcoin script opcodes are a way to build more complex contracts, and since this is a very new field of research available only when a digital currency like bitcoin is well established, I think it's normal that as time passes new ideas pop out and new opcodes are being proposed.
The more complex (and useful!) contracts you can do on the network, the more precious it gets.
And Hong Kong government is the biggest owner of Octopus card. In fact, I also heard that those Hong Kong meetings were organized by a company owned by Hong Kong government, is it a coincidence that they support this idea?
That's nonsense.
Prepaid cards are useful for solving a set of problems like micropayments (you can use it to make a 10c phone call that otherwise would be difficult to bill on a credit card), and so they gained a lot of space in the market.
Of course you can implement an improvement of the script function but that would require major consensus. If changing 1-2 takes 2 years then how long would it take to change the scripting system
For a major change yes, but since they expressly reserved a num of NOP codes in the script they were able to push new opcodes in a short time, like OP_CTLV and OP_CSV, via a softfork.
Doing a radical change to the scripting system is certainly a big risk, and that's why I don't like this approach of soft fork, but having more power to use our own money is certainly a plus.
