[sanswork]

Lightning isn't even a good solution for most diehard bitcoin users. It's a failed project.

It would take 27 years to onboard every internet user to the lightning network unless you start adding level 3 aggregators and then at that point you lose all the benefit of it being on chain at all.

It would take almost 2 years just to onboard every American assuming during that time there were zero other bitcoin transactions. Then you need to add the fees for the on and off ramps to the individual transaction fees to get the real cost per transaction noting that these would go up quite a bit as the competition between lightning and non-lightning uses of the transaction space would drive prices higher.

[fruitworks]

The throughput is arbitrarialy limited by bitcoin's current block size, which hasn't been increased since satoshi's era.

Most cryptocurrencies have an adaptive block-size mechanism which allows the blocks to grow to a reasonable size which could facilitate such an onboarding of users. So it isn't a technical problem, it is just a question of bitcoin's current leadership, which is controlled by companies like blockstream.

[sanswork]

People have been debating the blocksize for a very long time now and there doesn't seem to be any large desire to change it so while the ability to increase it exists changing anything that fundamental about bitcoin seems to be a non-starter and while that is true lightning is pointless as a solution for the masses.

Even if you increase the block size 100x though you're still not improving the numbers much since my very generous numbers ignore activity outside of lightning and assume a single on chain transaction for every user and a perfect network.

[littlecranky67]

You mistake is, you overestimate the amount of people who want to be self custodial. You don't need to onboard every human being in the world on-chain.

[sanswork]

Given the US example that would be several years in the absolute best for lightning case to onboard even 5% of individuals. Lightning is doomed from the start.

And if you don't care about self custody then the overhead of using a blockchain is a waste.