I always thought if banks could lose the shackles of Fiat they would have the perfect infrastructure for being lightning nodes. Opened a channel to your bank, your bank has channels open to all the shops, banks, and other "account holders" (people with channels to the same bank). They would make fees by keeping the channels balanced and create an entire web of commerce. But no, there's just a few companies that operate well connected nodes instead of using a federated model (local, county, state, country). 

 What a concept