Maybe if the limit was higher.  Payment channels still require at least one transaction per payment channel set.  How often are you willing to reset payment channels?  Once per week, once per month, once per year? The longer the period the larger the initial escrowed amount.  How many payment channels if the average user going to have. Say the average user accepts escrowing 6 months worth of future payments and has 3 payment channels payees each.  BTW I consider this unrealistically low and of this was the upper limit most users would trade principles for convinience and user centralized services.  Still lets look at it as an upper bound. That still requires 6 on block transactions per user per year.  2 tps @ 6 txn per user =  10.5  million users.  

Do you really think Bitcoin will be a global revolution with an upper limit @ 10 million users?


Payment channels are a great concept but even they are hamstrung but a ridiculously low limit.  We wouldn't even be having this discussion if the limit was anywhere near realistic but it simply isn't. A 1MB cap is simply a joke.  It just guarantees that either Bitcoin dies on the vine or it is replaced by something superior. Payment channels, sidechains, and cross chain atomic transactions are transaction multipliers.  They move us from one economic transaction per block transaction to more than one economic transaction per block transaction and that is a great thing.  If natively a blockchain can support n users it can support xn users where x>1 using payment channels.  In essence they make the primary block space more efficient but efficiency only takes us so far.  You can't get any kind of scalability out of 1MB permanent limit.  It either remains perpetually a nerd toy or it is killed off by something which can scale.