How can bitcoin & lightning support a full planet adoption rate of settlements?
Just trying to understand how this works, and whether or not this might be a problem.
Lets imagine Bitcoin is finally adopted, and most people use it. For 8000M-10.000M inhabitants that means probably between 2000M and 5000M "households" or individual Bitcoin account parties.
Imagine most of those households follow the regular recommendations, they will hold their own coins in their own wallets.
For daily usage, they will have a considerable part of their BTC locked up in the Lightning Network, so they can spend quickly even small amounts of satoshis.
But, also per recommendations (last time I checked) they should want to settle their BTC from time to time to the layer 1 Bitcoin network. Specially if they want to save that money, which is what Bitcoin gives you that fiat took away by design.
So if millions of parties want to settle at a pace of 7 transaction per second we get:
- 2000M parties would be able to settle every 3306 days, meaning 1 settlement per 9 years!
- 5000M parties would do 8267 days per settlement, 1 settlement every more than 22 years!
Let's do the it other way around. Imagine we want to know how many tps we need if 2000M-5000M parties want to settle monthly. That means between 800 tps to 2000 tps.
I understand that we want the Bitcoin blockchain to be as lean as possible, so all history fits on a regular computer you can have at home, not a huge expensive cloud instance, which would make the network centralized.
But still, how can bitcoin & lightning cater for a full planet adoption rate of settlements?
Maybe we need to forget about individual holdings as adoption grows?
Maybe people wanting to settle will be a minority? (less than 18Millions parties monthly for instance)