I'll obviously have to read more and maybe try this out soon, but it was my understanding that the speed of 100 000 TPS was more based on available nodes? With fewer nodes, fewer transactions? If that is the case then this technology seems pretty scalable to whatever is required by the network.
Correct, just read this part carefully:
Scale: According to our tests so far, we can achieve better-than-Visa scale (100,000 TPS) with only a few thousand nodes on the network
This is why we need exact numbers. 'A few thousand nodes' could be a lot of numbers. I'm interested in how many nodes are required to achieve 1000 TPS.
I don't really get the overall idea here, but what caught my attention are the scale and extremely cheap payments.
Start with reading the Lightning Network wallpaper and finding ELI5 explanations.
And with cheap payments,this could entice more people into the bitcoin world.
Bitcoin is already cheap; I don't see why this would make a difference as far as that is concerned.