The L1/L2 distinction is not only a Bitcoin thing; it addresses problems which are fundamental to blockchain architectures. As the market matures, developers and users will come better to recognize which transactions belong on a blockchain, and which don’t. A beneficial side effect of Bitcoin’s scaling debates is that Bitcoin is years ahead of any altcoin in L2 developments. (Notwithstanding how Ethereum has been spinning its wheels with L2 talk; it has much worse scaling problems than Bitcoin, and thus far much less to show in terms of solutions.)
The problem is that Bitcoin itself is not adequate to support the L2 systems being constructed for it.
(Something explicitly acknowledged by the LN developers by the way). The problem is not that Bitcoin is inadequate to the purposes to which I would like to see it put (which might have fallen by the wayside, admitedly) but also to those you are suggesting for it.
Do you have a citation for that? I have not seen such a thing, although I admit I that have not followed LN development closely as I should; I have been more checking into it from time to time, waiting for a few particular parts of it to mature.
By the way, what use cases would you like to see? If we get to the point of high-value transactions and upper-layer settlements on the blockchain, small-value transactions off-chain, and RGB/Spectrum doing smart contracts, tokens, NFTs, DEXes, etc., then what more is needed? I am sincerely curious. On this point, off the top of my head, all that can I think of are some smart contract edge cases where the contract code must be available for execution without parties being online; that’s not a case for bigger blocks, but rather, for one of the upstart ETH2 competitors.
I'm not going to argue for bigger blocks right now though. I think the need is going to become ever more self evident. Indeed, the recent hashrate crash would have been largely a non-even if there was adequate capacity.
As I noted in one of my earlier posts, Bitcoin transaction demand is high enough that I don’t even think that a blocksize increase would meaningfully increase capacity. And it only grows! How do you propose that, say, twice a very low TPS would make any difference, when we need
orders of magnitude higher TPS to cover all of the small-value tx use cases with mass adoption? Bigger blocks won’t get us to 10k TPS and up, unless you think that a node should need a supercomputer to run.