Average transaction size will generally go down over time. Sats will appreciate in value and everything else will deflate. LN channels will hold more value and be able to transaction more value per sat and the early holders of sats will be able to buy more for less sats.
On the other hand:
  • Deflationary/hard economic systems encourage to consume less but higher quality. This could make transactions fewer but bigger.
  • Atm the Lightning Network transacts a lot of gimmicks like sats every minute of podcast playback or play2earn yield of a few hundred every time. Every day economy of humans has bigger transactions
  • Institutions are not on Lightning yet. Big corporations and institutions will push average transaction size higher.
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You know how much junk people buy? Yeah all of that useless crap will be cut out.
Well yes because LN is able to. That Doesn’t affect normal/other transactions/purchases. Again things priced in fiat will trend down in terms of sats until a certain point.
Well some. River is putting out average transactions of 47$. So you can convert that to sats and extrapolate trends from it. Institutions will either use onchain or liquid for fat sat transactions. So most of those will be off LN. I’m sure we will get an average size much larger than a median size. I can’t imagine what large corporations would be using LN for other than to sell and pay employees with.
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if LN channels appreciate in value, wouldn’t that raise a given node’s ability to route larger USD-denominated payments?
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Well yes. When items are priced from their fiat equivalent the amount of sats will be lower so channels will be able to route more and routing to an exchange will give you more buying power when converting to fiat from sats. I won’t complain if my sats are worth more in fiat.
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