I think he means that if there wasn't adoption of bitcoin, there wouldn't be any problems. The fact that solutions are being developed for scalability is a good thing since it means that adoption continues to increase.
There was a famous speech about how the internet is a series of tubes and if we allow people to download too much junk, e-mails will get stuck and the internet will collapse.
But the internet didn't care, it just kept growing.
Layer 2s (lightning and others that will come), fedimints, and of course their will be centralized financial services bitcoin companies that use bitcoin rails but might have their own private layers on top (I know that's blasphemous to bitcoiners but it will happen).
Maybe sidechains down the road but I think layer 2s and adoption are much more important in the coming years. Focusing on Sidechains now is akin to building a building and working on the gym, pool and sauna on the 50th floor before building the elevator.
I might get shit on for this, but I think the solution to scalability is trusted bank-like institutions.
Now, hear me out. LN is great, but liquidity is a problem and how many people who use LN-based apps are actually running their own nodes and have their own channels open? Majority are probably using custodial services like WalletOfSatoshi or Stacker.News. In reality, they are relying on the app to utilize LN while they maintain an account on the app. The funds are in the control of the app runners.
And that's perfectly fine. Here's why I think so:
The underlying asset is still in fixed supply and immune to debasement. That doesn't change.
The underlying asset is more verifiable than fiat. So these bank-like institutions won't get to claim more assets than they actually have--ones that do will be more easily found out and people will move to another provider
The network is still open source and permissionless.
Anyone who prefers not to put their trust in a bank-like institution can opt out and use the base layer. It might be more expensive, but that's okay. People should be willing to pay the cost for their space on the chain.
If the market is not meeting a user need, the open source nature will ensure that some solutions gets developed to meet that need
I really like the outlook of Arc and Fedimint. Pair them with the lightning network and we would see massive semi-trustless scaling solutions come to fruition.
For sure, until we can get to a point where non-custodial can feel as simple as custodial or get so close that the switching is near seamless, it remains a popular on-ramp that will remain sticky
I think things like Fedimint will become necessary for the average user - lightning payments can tie it all together but if thousands of users are able to make use of a single channel, the scaling really takes off. Whether that's through a side chain with a lightning bridge, chaumian e-cash based federation, or something else remains to be seen. The key is to minimize trust to the maximal extent possible, and there are multiple approaches. What I would prefer and what the market coalesces around may be wildly different, so it's all highly speculative.