Here’s the answer:

Nothing is free. There is a high cost to enable hundreds of thousands to run Bitcoin nodes and secure the network. So high in fact, that it does prevent there from being final settlement of all global transactions, or even one transaction per person per year, on the main Bitcoin network. But this is a reality which should not be tampered with.

There are many great solutions which have different sets of trade offs to solve this problem. Liquid, Fedimint, Sidechains, Lightning, Ark, Channel Factories, Zero-Conf channels, Uncle Jim setups, etc. But frankly, before we can even start addressing this issue as a serious problem, you’d need to get 250M people who are demanding an annual sovereign Bitcoin transaction. That’s not the current reality.

In the future, most people will interact with Bitcoin through Bitcoin banks, and semi-trusted organizations like Liquid, Sidechains, and Fedimints. There’s trade offs to this, but even with its drawbacks it’s still magnitudes better than the current world.

Consider this - in fiat, you can take custody of a small amount of money (cash) but any meaningful amount of money essentially has to be held by a third party custodian like a bank or be someone else’s liability like government debt. With Bitcoin, it’s possible to take fully sovereign self custody of a large amount of money, but smaller amounts work best with some trust reinserted into the system. People with small amounts of Bitcoin have the economic guarantees of Bitcoin secured by people who have large amounts of Bitcoin.

Ultimately, if you’re someone who is talking about this problem right now, you’re early enough that you’ll always have enough Bitcoin to transact on the base layer (fees are denominated in BTC not USD). For those who adopt last, they will likely be doing so without even knowing it. Their pension will be buying Bitcoin on their behalf, or their bank or credit card company will have moved to a Bitcoin standard without them explicitly asking for it.

The worst thing we could do is try to change Bitcoin to accommodate tens of billions of transactions a year for people who don’t even demand them yet, and in the process destroy the distribution of the ledger and the robustness of Bitcoin itself.