When BTC fees become expensive and the LN fails due to on-boarding fees and friction from those fees, don't use federated (centralized) sidechain middlemen. Bitcoin was create to remove middlemen.

It was considered a "conspiracy theory" in 2015 that Blockstream planned to limit normal BTC usage in order force people to use some other future business of theirs.

Then Blockstream announced Liquid, a federated (centralized) side-chain business.

When BTC fees reach more than ~$20-50 on-chain (peer-to-peer) becomes unusable for most users. At the same time, LN transactions will become insecure because they will no longer be able to use HTLCs (hash time-lock contracts) due to Bitcoin's "dust" level increasing. Your BTC becomes un-spendable "dust" when the amount you have is less than the average on-chain transaction fee.

This should be seen as a complete network failure. Transaction confirmation times will increase by days and fees will outpace the value of BTC growth. Replace-by-fee guarantees that people will be paying more and more without getting any benefit. Fees increase due to the lack of available blockspace, not because the BTC market capitalization is rising. If the BTC price has a panic sell, fees will go up while the value within those transactions will go down. There is no law that says that higher fees are a result of a higher BTC exchange rate - the inverse can be true.

When BTC starts to fail, Blockstream may say, "Use Liquid! Just trust us." They created the problem and are now trying to sell you a solution. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's a business plan.

In the original Bitcoin Whitepaper, the purpose of Bitcoin was to remove the inherent weakness of middlemen.

Abstract A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. [...]

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.

Blockstream is a middleman. Of course they paid developers full-time and as consultants to prevent maximum blocksize upgrades. Of course they are attacking their "competitors" like Bitcoin Cash with trolling farms and other Dragon's Den tactics. Of course they are censoring previously open forums like r/bitcoin despite Bitcoin supposedly being about economic freedom. They are a for-profit company that has essentially acted as a gatekeeper over BTC. It's a simple example of corruption.

The reason Bitcoin was a game-changing technology from 2008-2015 was because it was purely peer-to-peer digital cash. That is how it got its initial user growth from early adopters and the corresponding USD value. People were speculating on future usability and potential.

Although BTC has limited its potential for actual usage, Bitcoin Cash is continuing the original reason cryptocurrencies were invented. Bitcoin Cash is peer-to-peer electronic cash for everyone on planet Earth.

submitted by /u/masterD3v
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/bn0rm5/when_btc_fees_become_expensive_and_the_ln_fails/