About 7 transactions per second on bitcoin, is it? 7 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 = 220752000 So about 220 million transactions per year.

If you're thinking about bitcoin as the savings account and lightning as the checking account you'll soon notice that the lightning situation as it exists today is probably not a feasible way on its own to scale bitcoin.

Let's illustrate: say you want to move funds between checking and savings once a month. You'll need at least 12 on chain transactions per year to do this. With this kind of usage fewer than 20 million people could use bitcoin.

The 220 million number ought raise some concerns knowing that there's 8 billion people. If transactions are equally distributed that gives each person one transaction every 36 years.

This is not about FUD. It's about realism. I think things like Fedimint are the future of scaling.

Maybe some new type of compression or very efficient use of blockspace will allow the bitcoin savings, lightning checking account model to work but it's not feasible for large scale adoption with the current state of the tech, Not by a long shot.

I remember Saif (bitcoiner economist and author Saifedean Ammous) imagining a situation where lightning operators come to function like banks, servicing many people. There will still be trust involved but the foundation of the monetary system will be non-inflationary. I think that's realistic and it's a win that can hardly be overstated.

If the tech folks figure out ways to build out fully cypherpunk-approved ways of scaling bitcoin where each individual maintains full self-custody etc all the better but a situation that functions much like the one currently existing, minus the inflation; that's still a vast vast vast vast huge tremendously ginormous improvement over the fiat disaster that's been unfolding the last couple of hundred years and accelerating in recent decades.

That's my two sats.