The central banks of the countries have reserves in different currencies and gold. The international transactions between two countries are recorded but not realized, there comes a time after a month or even months where the settlement is made. At this point it may happen that one of the two countries has to buy or sell foreign currency to settle the settlement.
It is a totally rudimentary process.
With Lightning Network this would be immediate, it would not even be necessary to carry out the process in deferred as it is currently done, the only possible compensation would be to add liquidity to the Lightning channel by one of the parties.
quotingGOLD:
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- Temporary high saleability (Its value is maintained and increases over time).
- Low spatial saleability (It is expensive to transport, international settlements are expensive).
FIAT:
- Low temporal saleability (Its value decreases over time)
- High spatial saleability (international settlements are cheap, a simple book entry in a DB, no transport required)
BITCOIN:
- High Temporal salability (Its value increases over time).
- High spatial marketability (international settlements are cheap, a simple book entry in a distributed and unalterable DB, no transport required)
Lightning network is perfect for large scale settlements, few understand. Lightning network removes the transaction restriction that Bitcoin has on the blockchain. If a Bitcoin standard were adopted, central banks could use Lightning Network for international settlements.
That said, we would not even need central banks to perform this type of settlements, these operations would be carried out directly between companies through the Lightning Network, contrary to what happens now.
This makes Bitcoin the best money in the world today.