A settlement layer has to compete with or beat gold as a store of value.  Bitcoin cannot accomplish that task so it has to do something else besides being a settlement layer or there is no point!

This is the gorilla in the room.  It turns out Roger Ver is wrong because slightly bigger blocks solves nothing.  Bitcoin would require a full blown LN capacity or it doesn't really have a value proposition.  The only question is, can the LN actually function?  It seems like to me you would have to place all channel closing in a centralized queue, so I have my doubts about LN.  And that is the real fundamental analysis of Bitcoin that most people in this thread either can't comprehend or sort of know there are issues like this but choose to ignore them and hope someone will pump it anyway.

So for bitcoin holders to have any value for their coins would need both miners to adopt segwit and LN to actually work in a decentralized manner, and there is currently no assurance for either one.  Although, I think it's likely they will pass segwit once people figure the conclusion I derive is true.  But then you still need LN to work in a decentralized manner or it's just some obfuscated form of Paypal.  Economy of scale might already cause terminal centralization for the 1st tier bitcoin network in the first place though, by driving the reqs to participate to corporation level.

From a fundamental perspective, people that can actually understand how all these variables interact (which I think are very few) know that in current state bitcoin is relatively broken in terms of long term workability.  The only question is how high can the price go before people figure that out.