>>Anyone who think Bitcoin is destined to be a niche network (50 million users) ought to sell their coins now and move on.



Thanks for your reply, but it doesn't really answer the question about the relative backlog if 50 million people were trying to perform two transactions every six months.



Regarding your point, you do realize that with the existing bitcoin network barely 2 million people can 'actively' use it, and that is using a very loose definition of the word 'active' as performing only two transactions a month.



The purpose of the Lightning Network is to act as a force multiplier on top of the existing bitcoin blockchain; as a compromise between users being able to hold value on the main network while shifting payment transactions to a layer-2 network. I happen to think that this is an excellent idea and something we should move towards.



The goal of my post was to 'fact check' some of the force multiplier claims on the LN website which appear to me to be off by nearly an order of magnitude. Also, it does seem to me that if we ever tried to support that many users with the current blocksize there would be an average backlog of three months simply to open a channel. I might be wrong on that, thus the question to Gavin.



The plan of record, regarding the LN, is that the blocksize will be scaled up to accommodate more users, once we actually reach so many users (not payment transactions but users) that they cannot open or close channels in a timely fashion. I actually agree with this long term plan, I don't think using the main bitcoin network for micro-transactions or low value payments is good idea. We are using it that way now, as the fees are still only around 8 cents for a transaction, but if we ever grow to more than a few hundred thousand active users obviously that use case fails.



We will need the LN to offload day to day payment transactions or, if not the LN, some other layer-2 solution which pegs value against the main blockchain. The issue, as far as I am concerned, is that none of those layer-2 solutions are ready today.



In the meantime, I think it is both relevant and important to call out LN if they are claiming a force multiplier that is off by more than order of magnitude and would actually break the bitcoin network if you ever tried to use it the way they suggest.