It will probably rely on the acceptance by people and technology development. In my personal opinion, Bitcoin will be significant payment alternative on-line. Its utilization is still growing day after day, however. Bitcoin has been called the "store of value" or "digital gold. However, its primary intent was likely to be peer-to-peer electronic cash, initially. So what will happen in the future is not certain. But common sense is that more will adopt Bitcoin only when they know how to use Bitcoin or it becomes easy for them and they are not afraid of the volatility of the Bitcoin market. Currently, Bitcoin is being seen as an investment opportunity. The people are now saving their money in Bitcoin and in future it is predicted to further rise.

Yes, this problem does not exist when it comes to capacity!
But the capacity problem still persists when you need to migrate people to LN!

So, thre are 4.5 billion Visa cards there, let's say 10 years ? So 450 million users to Lightning each year, 52,560 blocks/year so 8500 funding tx in a block...nope! 
Of course we could batch those tx, there would be an improvement, but still, nowhere near enough!
The only way is to abandon the principle of not your channel not your coins, lols, and go for a centralized custodial solution again!
And we're back to square one, why even use it?


USDT and USDC are taking market share here, on this damn bitcointalk forum, 5 years ago Bitcoin was the undisputed king here, now apart from collectibles and signatures stablecoins have takn over all deals. Loans in BTC? A thing of the past! Asic miners? USD only!

For Bitcoin to be globally attracting transactions from people, I think we need to properly educate people about the benefit of Bitcoin transactions. Many people are used to the traditional transaction method, they are totally committed to traditional transactions and don't care about Bitcoin even though they know Bitcoin exist. It's left for them to have one thing to be convinced they need Bitcoin. If you do this, you don't need to force people to use it globally for transactions.

Some people that own traditional platforms don't like the fact that Bitcoin exist, if Bitcoin take over, it's going to affect their businesses. Imagine that Visa and PayPal lose 1/2 of it's customer because they want to use Bitcoin, it's going to cost them. They will not like Bitcoin to over take their business.

reading your reply and the part which Bold from your post quoted here got me thinking if its possible for a transaction to not get confirmed after its already being settled on the lightning network?

i also think why most people are not interested in the lighting network, which bring about the low liquidity you mentioned, is its the complexity. if it was a straight forward process many people will not mind even if it will cost more fees.

If we look strictly at the raw on-chain math, the answer is a hard no on Layer 1, and not on pure Lightning alone without further protocol evolution.

When discussing whether Bitcoin can power all global commerce, people often overlook the baseline physics of the blockchain:

1. The "Channel Opening" Blockspace Bottleneck
Every Lightning channel requires at least one on-chain funding transaction and one closing transaction.

• A standard Bitcoin block averages ~2,000 to 2,500 transactions.
• At ~144 blocks per day, L1 can process roughly ~350,000 to 400,000 transactions daily at maximum saturation.
• If 1 billion active online consumers wanted just one non-custodial Lightning channel of their own, dedicating 100% of Bitcoin's global blockspace exclusively to channel openings (zero payments, zero consolidations, zero other use) would take roughly 7 to 8 consecutive years.
  

This proves that simple "L1 for settlement, L2 Lightning for payments" is mathematically insufficient for total global adoption.

2. The Working Capital & Liquidity Friction
Running non-custodial Lightning requires inbound liquidity and locked collateral. A merchant processing thousands of daily micropayments cannot constantly rebalance channels on L1 when mempool fees spike to 80+ sat/vB. The routing economics break down unless the liquidity providers are heavily capitalized routing hubs.

3. The Realistic Architecture: Multi-Tier Hierarchy
If Bitcoin does absorb online commerce, it will not look like every shopper broadcasting a direct L1 or L2 transaction. It will require a layered pyramid:

• Layer 1 (Base Layer): Global reserve settlement between central banks, institutions, and major protocol vaults.
  
• Layer 2 (State Channels Lightning): High-volume settlement corridors between liquidity providers, banks, and merchant aggregators.
  
• Layer 3 Off-Chain Enclaves (Ark, Fedimint, Cashu): Chaumian e-cash mints and shared-UTXO covenants where millions of day-to-day coffee and subscription transactions settle instantly with complete privacy, zero on-chain footprint, and cryptographic backing without requiring individual L1 UTXOs.
  

Bitcoin can power global commerce, but not by cramming billions of individual retail balances onto the base chain. It succeeds by acting as the incorruptible, mathematically scarce reserve asset that anchors off-chain payment networks.

Are merchants more likely to adopt layered trust-minimized protocols like Ark/Fedimint, or will centralized custodial processors simply become the "Visa of Bitcoin"?

This is a problem in theory that is not real right now, so why are we worrying about that? Are we anywhere close to having an issue with so many people waiting in line to migrate to Lightning? We are not there so I don't understand focusing on theoretical concerns do dismiss the best solution over small concerns. Right now Lightning is the most superior option to a problem that does not have a complete solution. We should use it, promote it, advertise it, and get people on lightning now when fees are low. Merchants do not have the issue of capacity, if people are on Lightning or not is not their concern. Adding Lightning is fast depending on how they have added Bitcoin or crypto already and it does not really cost them much to keep it accepted and in some cases it costs them an extra 0 dollars per month.

If we come to a time where we have a huge line of people waiting to migrate to people that would be amazing! We can worry about solving the problem as the issue becomes relevant.

Where is the data that confirms this? The stablecoins are being mostly used for things that fiat was used for. They are not replacing Bitcoin, they are replacing some digital fiat transactions.