Seems you're pretty pessimistic about Lightning. Does Monero intend to solve everything on layer 1? I was told that you fundamentally can never achieve scalability with layer 1 alone, and it was fairly convincing. I heard that block size is an absolute limit that constrains scale, and even if you try to make block size flexibly enlargeable to get around it, that just makes it even harder for ordinary people to run nodes. Combined with the fact that you can't prune the UTXO set for privacy reasons, and that transaction sizes are inherently larger, it's a design that's far more disadvantageous for scaling than Bitcoin—and the only reason it hasn't hit that problem yet is that there are far fewer users. If users grow, they argued, it'll become far harder to use than Bitcoin. Ultimately scale can only be solved with layer 2, but due to Monero's nature it's too hard to build a layer 2, so eventually ordinary people won't be able to run nodes, and the moment they delegate operation to experts, all of Monero's advantages become meaningless—that was their argument. It sounded plausible to me. What's the Monero brothers' answer to this?

I'm not attacking, I'm just asking because I'm curious. I also think the idea of Lightning, especially having ordinary people run it, is quite unrealistic. I just don't know much about Monero.