When i stay stabilize i don't mean it will stay the same for ever. it will just become less volatile the more it is uptaken. Value should continue to go up as the total supply is finite but should do so in a more predictable manner similar to gold. Of course this requires it's widespread uptake as a currency.

Unrelated note: part of why humanity stopped making our money out of precious metals was because the metal was worth more and more while the dollar held steady. So people started shaving the edges off silver coins, and then recievers had to start weighing money at the time of transaction (which slowed it all down). Making money fungible was a huge advantage for commerce.

I'm not sure that's really analogous to bitcoin, sure you can spend subdivisions of bitcoins but you cant shave sats off and still pass off a shaved bitcoin as a full one. a bitcoin is a bitcoin and a bitcoin with shaved sats is a bitcoin minus those shaved sats.

The lighting network feels like a tab at the hardware store where anyone can skip town anytime they want.

except with the lightning network, if your customer "skip[s] town" with lightning you can take the tab (channel) to the bank (blockchain) yourself and still get your payment. Opening a lightning channel requires staking the value of the channel up front. you can get unspent sats back but once you've made a transaction on the network then those sats belong to the person who you sent them to. You can try and close a channel with an older version of the channels ledger to try and "revert" the payment but there are mechanisms in place to stop this. if someone does that to you you can just broadcast the up to date ledger to the network and then you get everything in the channel including unspent sats as a penalty.

at least that's how i understand it