yeah, lightning's competition is credit cards and interbank transfers

there is ALREADY more nodes in the network than all of the interbank and credit card clearinghouse industry combined, of course the total settled value is a lot lower but if the question is "can it scale" it's absurd to say it isn't already scaled beyond what the fiat payment networks are, it's definitely bigger than they are already

and what's even more absurd is that i can run my own channel to two or more of these bigger, routing nodes, and not even have to depend on anyone else most of the time to move my sats around

i use onchain once a month when i get paid, i flip that into lightning balance usually on WoS and then zap it to load up my personal channels, which are big enough to swallow all of my monthly income, so after that, i don't even see onchain fees, and i'm sure i am one of maybe tens of thousands already doing this and we are the reason why there is profit and the number of public routing nodes on the network continues to increase, i don't know what the total liquidity of the network is now, of PUBLIC channels but it's probably nearing 10k bitcoin for sure, if not more

i can see this trend continuing for at least another 5 years if the only major competition for block space is oRdInAlS and dRiVeChAiNs... bless fiatjaf, he's a smart guy but this thing about drivechains, idk what to say, i been in shitcoins since 2016 and exchanges and mining my experience tells me that LN is going to displace all of the online decentralised money movement the number of vendors adopting it and setting up to use these rails is increasing every year, these people just haven't looked into it deeply enough to understand what is going on

nor do they get why nostr's core userbase is so tenacious and committed