Bitcoins transaction market share will drop precipitously, but its share of the economic pie of crypto will remain very significant and grow because of the reason I stated. BTC miners/whales do not care about transaction volume, they care about value of the transactions and thus the amount of fees that those whose transacts fit within 1MB block size can afford to pay. For example, when every BTC transaction is $10 million, then a $5000 fee per transaction will not be a problem.
What would the price of BTC need to be for such an high fee ($5000) to make it viable? I presume it would need to be really high, otherwise at some point even the rich would find other ways to move the wealth?
However, there are other chains coming which scale to very high transaction volume such as EOS and my own project.
Also there is Raiden for offchain on Ethereum and perhaps they did not design it to have the same pay to anyone flaw.
It looks like news of LN transactions on mainnet happened yesterday when the pump started, I wonder if it's related. The video got a lot of views:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k15,300 views, same as current price lol, and in less than a day. Must have created buzz and pumped the price further.
Im not gonna lie tho, it looks pretty slick.
What if it ends up working well? Let's say it catches on and the average Joe end user happily can buy coffees with BTC finally (they don't care about any of the technical details anyway), and there is no segwit attack and we all get rich from holding BTC? It's a possibility.
Also the problem from going from coin to coin is that if I want to put $50k worth of BTC in some altcoin to hedge, and this altcoin pumps and you double your money... you are going to need some serious verifications on the exchange to withdraw $100k worth of money. Poloniex only allows $2k daily, so you would be withdrawing daily one month and a half. Not looking forward to give my dox to some exchange, I don't trust them. There's also the taxes problem from trading between coins (if you want to buy some real estate you are going to need to explain how did you made all that money, and in some countries trades increase the tax). I just get an headache thinking about it and decide just hold through it, maybe some minor altcoin trading but nothing that would leave me months of withdrawing on exchanges. Too stressful considering exchanges can disappear at any time.