Please don't suggest people use silly altcoins for payments instead of Bitcoin. With LN you pay a fee once, and not even high as you suggest, like $3 maybe, and then you can transact all you want for like less than a cent per transaction. Altcoins are not even money they are just centralized tokens, so you really can't compare them to using Bitcoin. The answer to bitcoin fees being a few dollars is never "use an altcoin", but rather "use L2". Just as if someone doesn't take cash the answer isn't "use shells", but rather "use a credit card".
The fee you're going to pay will depend on how congested the Bitcoin blockchain is. It's not fixed at $3. It could be a lot higher if there's a resurgence in network activity. Altcoins (although many are centralized) are a much cheaper option than the LN (when taking into consideration paying a one-time fee on the BTC blockchain). Besides, the L2 network isn't ready for mainstream use. It's full of bugs. If the LN experiences an outage or collapses, you can say "bye-bye" to your sats for good.
Things aside, I think it's possible Bitcoin will reach Gold's market cap. Especially when a lot of prominent institutional investment firms are showing huge interest in it. I'd say we are still early to the game. Once BTC "explodes", market prices will be a lot higher than what they are right now. Perhaps, it will replace Gold in the future?
