Also Arweave which offers effectively infinite term storage.

The thing is, mining those coins provides an incentive structure that lightning currently lacks. Basically if someone wants people to dance ballet, they emit BalletCoin and tell people that they can dance to mine it, and so the network periodically checks who's dancing and randomly awards newly created BalletCoins. Now the drawback of this scheme is that people sooner or later start to wonder: wait, did we just spend all that effort for some shitcoins? (Yes.) But still we'd need to replicate something similar with lightning.