What’s wrong with federated side chains like liquid? At this point the federation is more decentralized than the bitcoin hash rate (somewhat joking obviously).
I have almost conceded that “the masses” will not embrace bitcoin. Just like most people, literally 99% of the world, could care less how the fiat system works.
We need the optimistic builders and visionaries to embrace bitcoin. The mainchain will still have a much greater wealth distribution than the current global fiat systems. This applies even to nation states.
The UTXO set size is currently 123 million.