I have been thinking a little bit about the future of Bitcoin with regards to scaleability, but I'm a cryptography layperson, and so I'm hoping to find some clarity from people who know better.
I understand that Lightning can scale the number of transactions per second of the Bitcoin network, but there is still the problem of onchain settlement for billions of users.
In the future, single key transactions will become too expensive for the average person - the number of single key transactions per day (say 500,000) divided by the total number of possible people on the network (say 5 billion) gives the average user 1 transaction every 27 years... meaning the average person will never have the opportunity to ever get close to performing transactions onchain.
Part of the fundamental operation of Lightning is the ability to redeem your channel balance onchain in the event your counterparty stops responding; you cannot operate solely on Lightning, you must have the ability to redeem onchain, and onchain redemption is impractical when the cost of a single transaction is a significant proportion of your total balance.
Does some existing BIP - e.g. Schnorr signatures - solve this problem? Or is there a planned BIP which will solve this problem?
I have found academic papers and StackExchange posts which seem to be relevant but go way over my head.
Could someone clarify this for me?
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