I find these story of stories silly but also indicative of the market. We are in a crytpocurrency mania and these read like the "Meet the 25 year old dot com millionaire who bought stock in valinux/webvan/pets.com/etc!" from 1998 that dragged even more nontechnical people into the manic runup then.
All I know is people that I'd never expect to know what bitcoin is are suddenly talking about it. What's that tell you?
It's about to go mainstream.
It could stay as a store of value though, like gold.
It's primarily held up on Bitcoin's variant on party politics, more than anything else - there's functional payment channel code working on Litecoin's main network and Bitcoin's testnet.
The issue, if anything, is exactly the opposite - that there'll be little incentive to mine without enough transactions on the chain, and the security of the network will come crashing down.
Lightning Network also provides for decentralised, trustless currency exchanges - so the inflexibility of one blockchain will finally not matter much. You could pay someone in bitcoin and the other person could receive litecoin as easily as you can do similar things with a credit card today.
Nothing you said addresses the concern that the people pushing lightening network the hardest are religiously opposed to raising the block size which will make it impossible to deploy lightening on a world wide scale because there won't be enough on chain transaction space to open up these lightening channels.
In addition to this, as I said, the fact that Lightning Network is a protocol that allows cross-blockchain transactions between any two chains supporting Lightning Network means that if, as you say, Bitcoin has severe problems, everyone will just jump ship to another currency, as there will be far fewer switching costs.
It's nonsensical, because you might as well just design an entirely new protocol and token network (which is essnetialy what the lightning network is, and there's no reason to tie it to an existing cryptocoin ledger unless you're trying to improve the antiquated design which coincidently you have coin units in).
If you can successfully build a Lightning Network like system without a blockchain, please do.
> But it may probably not be a solution or take a couple of decades, like the scalability of Elon Musk's projects.
But OK, if you meant something other than what you actually said, fine.
You said that Lightning network would drop transaction costs thus making bitcoin workable. I said it would do nothing because the problem is not technical but social. But I don't mind if you understood a different thing.
Whether or not you think that matters is political dogma.
"very volatile int he short term"
Looking at the one year time scale BTC/USD is only about 2-3x as volatile as USD/EUR. Bitcoin volatility in general has been trending DOWN since it's inception as you would expect something to become more stable as the market matures and more people adopt it.
https://www.investing.com/tools/forex-volatility-calculator https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/volatility-index/
"transactions are expensive and slow"
By what standard? A typical transaction costs less than a dollar and takes about 10 minutes. Once the people holding the block size hostage are out of the way you can expect the cost to return to cents and the speed to be more reliable at 10 minutes or less.
Anyone who thinks Bitcoin can be a store of value like Gold w/o having utility as money is fooling themselves. You need to both.
Are you kidding? BTC/USD easily has 10%+ swings in a day, and 300% in a year.