... a discussion where I pointed out the natural consequence of Dab's hypothetical situation.
I'll reply here, just for you. I may be one of those doing that (closing opening channels daily) but not everyone has to. Perhaps when the tech is more understood. I mean, I already make one or two "real" transactions per day. What's one or two channels which blooms up into infinity? If I change the example to open and close a channel once a week or once a month, and everyone else does that ... you have capacity for the world, or more.
That would be better, but not world. With today's bitcoin, we remain mired at less than half-million transactions a day. If everyone opens and closes one channel once a week, we can accommodate at most 1.75 million users. If the average user opens and closes a channel once per month, we are limited to 7.5 million users. Three orders of magnitude from world scale.
And yes, we still don't know how many channels each user will maintain on average, and how often they will feel the need to update. But if they only maintain a single channel, it lends credence to the centralized hub conjecture. And if they very seldom refresh their channels, they are limited to however much funds they can put in the channel at creation - of course, assuming they don't get paid in Bitcoin within Lightning.
Also, don't forget, it's not exactly channels or transactions per day or per second, it's per block, and with a high enough fee, it stays in the mempool until it gets into a block.
This is true. I use the per day figure, as it starts one thinking about sustained throughput, instead of burst capacity. If total sustained demand exceeds total sustained throughput, there will always be transactions that never get included in blocks.
But if you want to calculate an average, based on one channel a year, that's about a million channels per day, or three hundred sixty five channels in a year, with each channel having a million transactions. So it's not 7 or 8 billion ...
OK, assuming we ever get to one million per day, is it realistic that the average user tops off his one and only Lightning channel (there's that centralization again) once per year? I don't think so. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. Even if so, that would be hard capped at 365 million users. Again, well short of our goal. And this is assuming only on open _or_ one close per user per year.
Thanks for the respectful continued discussion.