I don't feel the need to preface every question with a reinforcing statement for Bitcoin. If you think it's FUD or that I'm asking "innocent questions" with alternative motives, that's your interpretation. Seeing useful replies with counter-arguments to the initial questions will itself remove FUD.
You're right and I apologize for that.
It's as simple: underlying hardware is advancing, getting bigger and cheaper, hence if this is not a big problem now, it should also not be in the future.
Agree that hardware is advancing and getting bigger. So is the size of the blockchain. The question then becomes the relative rate of increase. The graph in the link below shows the increase in the size of the blockchain over the last decade.
In 2015, it was around 40GB. It is now over 300GB. My computer has a hard drive with 500GB. While I would've been happy to download the block in 2015, it is now too big for me. Yes, I could easily fork out another $100 to buy a new hard drive but this is something I would've have needed to do a few years ago.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/647523/worldwide-bitcoin-blockchain-size/Indeed. The thing is that with the current code there's a maximum size that can be added to the blockchain. The 1 TB / 5 years was not reached yet, else we would be some 2.2 TB now. And although 2.2 TB may look
a bit big for a download or as space locked on your HDD, is not
that expensive or difficult to download, right?
It's simply impossible for us to function solely on LN, or at least without a fairly huge dependency on it. LN is really not the panacea to the problems that we're facing right now.
I expect that the not-so-great current use of LN and the fact that many make only smaller short lived channels may make current calculations not the much correct. (but yeah, I know that I may be wrong)
That's why I said "well thought channels". And increased on-chain fees will make people think twice if they make their own LN channels for each 1 or 10 small transactions or use one on-chain tx and move some funds into a service's wallet, using LN from there. I know that this hurts decentralization big, but this is how I see LN work. If we don't like this, then indeed we need other solutions, including bigger blocks, bigger chain size, better handling of that size...
But for now the only problem I see is that LN is under-used and still labeled as "beta".
There are a few threads, off the top of my head that I've discussed about LN and the need for on-chain transactions as well. I think that would be a better starting point.
[/quote]