Here are some of the benefits and drawbacks of hardware wallets and paper wallets:
Hardware Wallets:~snip
Drawbacks:
- Can be lost or damaged
- Cost more than paper wallets
- Potentially difficult for beginners
Paper Wallets:~snip
Drawbacks:
- Not user-friendly
- Can be lost or damaged easily
- Not portable
You say "Can be lost or damaged" for the hardware wallets while you say "Can be lost or damaged easily" for the paper wallets like paper wallets were more fragile than HW. I think you should try to drop your HW into your bath or your freezer, to throw it against a wall or to apply an electric cable on it and then you should try to do the same thing with a paper wallet... Paper wallets are even resistant to radioactivity fyi.
Actually when you use a HW you need to back up your seed onto a paper, because of its weakness.
It's impossible for 1.5 billion people to use on-chain Bitcoin. Currently, Bitcoin is having less than 1.5 billion transactions in a decade, and there's no on-chain block capacity for much more.
I understand what you mean, but the story of Bitcoin is only at its beginning, I hope so anyway.