...if users want many tx/s, if they want microtxs, if they want instant txs, if they want decentralization, if they want lower costs, etc etc, all these can't be achieved with onchain scaling right now
I think they probably can. It's just that we've been convinced they can't by people like Adam Back who have a kind of religious belief that bitcoin was a "one-off event'.
Is it Adam Back's fault that Bitcoin can't currently scale in a decentralized manner, to, say, a 300tx/sec level at 100mb blocks - or even 1/10th that? No. These are technical issues. It's not a matter of "convincing" and "religious beliefs".
I think you'd find that if technologists really wanted to create a unified, scaleable, instant monetary medium based around a single blockchain then they probably could if they weren't all ego maniacs that thought they were saving the world from financial oblivion rather than just solving another day to day technical problem.
Why is it then that every altcoin is waiting for bitcoin to solve the scaling issue? If technologists had a solution, where is it? Shouldn't it be available right now in some altcoin? Shouldn't the "market gap" allow altcoins to close in by innovating? Why aren't they?
The difference between holding something in your hand and holding a promissory note that says you have it "in your hand" is something that the general public understands very well and if that is the basis for bitcoin's so called "scaleability" then it will only open up markets for electronic assets for which it isn't. Thats all I'm saying.
Remember that bitcoin is all about virtual assets so at every moment you never have anything in your hand. It's all in the "cloud" of the blockchain. Even the notion of the "wallet" is just for familiarity purposes. There is no "my wallet". But even for those who believe there is a wallet, and are engaged in a payment channel to aggregate small payments with greater efficiency, they can close that channel and get the money to their wallet. It's that simple.
We don't have to deal with issues like these because we currently don't have thousands of tx per block to deal with. Otherwise we would probably need payment channels as well. Actually it might also be useful for mixing purposes to offload the bloat of a multi-party, multi-round mixing, into a payment channel, eliminating on chain mixing bloat.