It will be interesting to watch BTC development move forward. There was a huge portion of the community pushing for bigger blocks who have now shifted there holdings towards BCH. These people will now support keeping BTC crippled at 1 MB, as they believe that shifting value from BTC -> BCH is now the best solution. So we have a situation where both small-blockers will be pushing for no block size limit increase AND big-bockers (like me) will also be pushing for no block size limit increase. So I think it will be difficult for BTC to scale if Lightning Network (LN) doesn't work out as planned.
Why would LN not work out as planned? Just out of curiosity, I'm eager to know where the BCash hope is.
I don't think the LN will work technically for two main reasons: (1) the high fees to open and close channels will make it too expensive to be practical, and (2) there is no known solution to route-finding with a mesh topology so the network will have a hub-and-spoke topology instead.
But let's ignore that for now and assume that LN will work like BS/Core expects. There is still the _huge_ problem that LN is a new network and needs lots of people to adopt it in order for it to have value. I think people think that when LN is "released" that suddenly all wallets will be able to make LN payments just like they can make bitcoin payments today. But that's not what will happen; instead, the first people to open channels will only be able to send payments to a couple of vendors and a handful of connected people. It will take years and years for the network infrastructure to get the point that Bitcoin was at 3 years ago. Not only does every Bitcoin wallet need significant engineering development work done to it to make it "LN ready," but a huge amount of people need to take the risk to open LN channels and commit to keeping their money there to bootstrap the network.
If you think segwit uptake was slow (it's still only 10%!), then LN uptake will be like molasses. In fact, a recent tweet by Jameson Lopp indicated that "LN is already released! Now it's up to you guys to make it useful!" Watch how quickly it grows now [hint: very very slowly if at all].
Unless you want to keep it secret, so your master-plan to sabotage Bitcoin would not be revealed too soon.
BTC is sabotaging itself.
Bitcoin works because of incentives. What I meant was that now we have a situation where the economic incentives for people like me (who hold more BCH than BTC) is to align ourselves with the small-blockers to _avoid_ increasing the block size limit. This will push more commerce and value to the BCH network.
What Bcash ultimately lacks is trust. No one trusts the competency of the developers. No one trusts Roger or the miners that advocated for Bcash. So what if LN takes 10 years? Bcash will not have earned the trust of Bitcoin in 10 years. Your merchant adoption theory won't happen in any significant way in that period of time. You are typical of the microwave society with little patience. Where was the internet 9 years in - January 1, 1992? It was a complete mess.
Peter, you must know the history of Linux and how the exact same thing happened with competing factions declaring the core open source developers as wrong and splitting off to create a "better" Linux. All those competing attempts failed. Don't you see what is happening?