If you've attempted to send an on-chain transaction in the last week, you'll be well aware just how busy the network is. Morons are flooding the mempool with NFT's and BRC-20 junk, rendering fees higher than many of us have ever experienced. While this madness cannot be maintained forever, it does give us a glimpse of times to come, a hyperbitcoinized future where everyone is trying to participate. It show us that we are not prepared.
What exactly are the conditions this future will require bitcoin to handle? First are transactions so large that they demand on-chain bitcoin be used to make them, let's say any transaction of more than $100K USD equivalent at present. Let us estimate that around 5% of the world's population will need to make a transaction like that at least once over the course of a year. That's 50M people per billion. Across the blockchain, that's ~951 transactions per block, each and every single year, per billion people. We're already stuffing the blockchain and we've barely got started.
So Lightning has become essential. It's also not enough. It would take decades to just open channels for everyone. So, Fedimint, LNDHub, LNbits; the shared UTXO technologies are also essential. The tech that is so underdeveloped it's barely more than a pipe dream right now. Also so removed from the promise of Bitcoin as to undercut the whole enterprise. If almost no one can ever afford to transact using true bitcoin at at least the lightning layer, and as such the money nearly everyone uses is merely bitcoin-backed, has this dream failed?
One thing is certain: far more development work needs to be spent on getting shared UTXO tech to be fully operational and available to all, and fast. Every bitcoin company, without exception, needs to fully support lightning. And all of us need to put our heads together and figure this problem out. Because if the tech isn't ready when the world is, this fails.