Say what you will about cryptocurrencies, but the transaction volume over the last year doesn’t scream “taking over the world”… looks like treading water. A lot of noise about crypto, but it’s not reflected in the blockchain.
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The total amount of on-chain Bitcoin transactions doesn't correspond to real world transactions. A single transaction can represent an unlimited number of real world transactions. Lightning channels are a single transaction, and transactions can have multiple inputs/outputs too.
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There isn't room for a bunch of additional on-chain transactions. Raising block size 10x would allow for 10x as many transactions at the expense of increased centralization from needing 10x as much bandwidth/storage for the blocks. It wouldn't replace needing layer 2 to scale.
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There are chains trying to scale up substantially through much larger block sizes and more frequent blocks but Bitcoin didn't take that path. Scaling it up 10x, 100x or even 1000x clearly wouldn't be enough. You're looking at the settlement layer not a layer for small payments.
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An in-person purchase needs near instant settlement so they have to use Lightning.
On-chain is still fine for certain online purchases and fees are currently low but they wouldn't be if people were trying to scale that out as a payment mechanism instead of focusing on Lightning.

