Okay I guess I understand. Lighting "scales payments but not ownership", right? LN has the benefit of unilateral exit, but of course this only applies to UTXO owners, who themselves may be the "benevolent custodians".

So Darth, do you think there is even theoretically a Layer 2 for bitcoin? Is it possible at all? What would the mechanism be? Does it require some yet-undiscovered cryptography algo?

What do you make of Mercury, which "lifts" private keys rather than dealing with UTXOs? It also allows unilateral exit, so there is no risk of loss of coins, only of censorship (denial of use of the L2 itself). They have a centralized server, but what would you think if they decentralized that?