Even knowing that op started this thread to shill a centralized random shitcoin (xrp), which definitely will NOT solve all scalability issues, I feel almost forced to clear some things up.


Lightning is NOT a solution for big payments
Bitcoin is already able to handle this. You can send Bitcoins worth millions for a very small fee already, so there is no need to find another solution. Lightning fees are measured by the amount you send and not the tx size. Most big payments will be cheaper on the btc mainchain. Discussions about how big payments can be send over lightning are a non issue.


Lightning is a solution for small payments
You can buy a coffee and a piece of cake with lightning and pay a very low fee. You can tip people a few satoshis and pay a very low fee. That's what lightning is good at.

There is NO need for everybody to open channels
You can use a lightning wallet like Breez for example, which gives you inbound liquidity up to 0.04 BTC (4 million satoshis) and you can accept lightning payments instantly without caring about opening channels. You can use @lntxbot on Telegram to send and receive satoshis to/from everybody else on telegram. No need to open channels for this. There are more solutions like that. Find out for yourself

Payments within the lightning network are not countable from the outside
There is no open ledger, which counts the payments made on lightning. Only node operators can count how many paments they are routing on their own node. They don't know what's exactly happening on other nodes. This makes lightning payments practically anonymous, which is a nice side effect. When people start to crunch numbers on how many payments the lightning network is able to handle, forget about them. They don't know because they can't!