I'm glad to see you no longer pushing your fake 'all-or-nothing' version of the substitution effect. That's progress I can work with.
I never have.
My bad, sorry, you did say "When the fees get high enough people
start switching" which indicates the marginal cases being phased out.
I was distracted by your violent rhetoric about "hitting a brick wall" and Bitcoin Obituary-type "nobody really cares about Bitcoin any more" speculation. Again you were right, as in the example of nobody caring about whale oil anymore because of superior substitutes.
Regardless, LN is not an off-chain solution. Using LN is not like using a bank. There are no TTPs. I think of such trustless payment channels as Layer 0.9 (when they are settled they become part of Layer 1). It's just a write cache; surely you know how those work.
To be honest, I find your reasoning by analogy (involving a lecture about the history of cybernetics, which I don't really need, having also been alive in the era of punch cards and educated in the intellectual progression from Babbage and Lovelace on through Shannon/Wiener/Turing/VonNeumann/Vannevar Bush and finally to Don Knuth, Bill Joy, and Francis Heylighen) to be the opposite of persuasive.
Even worse is your conflation of the hard work of doing the engineering with lazy analogies and
argumentum ad Newegg ('zomg cheap storage'). I've terminated more than a few SCSI chains and read StorageReview, so don't try the 'get off my lawn' stuff with me!
I've copied floppies; my first HD was 120MB (yes MB not GB). My last one was 2TB. But I still realize Moore's Law and its analogues are not really laws, just observations that will ultimately succumb to the law of diminishing returns because of physics (if not sooner because of politics).
I have done the engineering. Please see this link.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/IBM_card_storage.NARA.jpg. This is a picture taken during my lifetime. Now try to run the current VISA network using punched cards and tabulating machines.
Credit cards existed before this picture was taken.
If they are using LN or some other off chain solution there are using some kind of bank by another name.
If they are using a side chain they are using an alt-coin by another name
In both the above cases there remain the serious security issues that smooth has mentioned in a prior post, in particular how do you secure the Bitcoin main chain. So my solution was to move from Bitcoin to a combination of XMR and CAD. I have both the solutions above. The "sidechain" XMR and the "bank" CAD.
Of course if you want a higher TX priority you have to pay for it. In a normal market It also means that if people offer to pay more for TXs they get an increase in supply of TXs. It is here where Monero TXs behave as a normal market. If there is an increase in demand, leading to an increase price it results this in an increase is supply. With Bitcoin TXs no matter how much the demand and price increase there is no increase in supply, and therein lies the fatal flaw in the Bitcoin TX market and by extension in Bitcoin itself.
The whole point of Bitcoin was to replace the bank for certain transactions, not to create a "better" bank so davout is dead wrong here.
Bitcoin is by design a settlement system, so Davout is exactly right. There was never any real chance of everybody on Earth wantonly writing to the Holy Ledger all the time, for all eternity, every time a coffee or bus ticket is purchased.
They guy who played Riker to Satoshi's Picard told us that years ago:
"I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash." Hal Finney, Dec. 2010
The problem is you
don't misunderstand how Lightning and sidechains work, thus making flawed conclusions based on false premises. There are type mismatch errors in your mental code. Hint: sidechains != alt chains.
I sincerely urge you to forget everything you think you know about LN/SC (especially the bits related to punch cards) and relearn the topics with fresh, unjaundiced eyes. It took me a while to stop 'fighting features' and come around to the ideas, but I have and as a result of that deep due diligence am more optimistic about BTC's future than ever before.
It's great you're so enthused about Monero, but even our core devs don't share your 'Monero will replace Bitcoin, Because Blocksize' POV.
Please consider diversifying some of those CAD into a few BTC. I hate seeing a fellow Mustang go long fiat!