> Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design.

Big blocks would have never solved this issue, and you're still free to use Bcash, but you won't as no one does... because that wasn't the issue.

Second layer solutions are the crux of that story, and people who didn't or wouldn't understand that were vocal non-tech people (like Roger Ver) who don't understand basic network protocol topology and why things need to run on secondary, tertiary etc... layers on Bitcoin (the Network) that uses bitcoin (the token) to validate your $20 tx on the blockchain, which by the way if you paid $60 for goes to show you never understood Bitcoin the network.

No one would sacrifice that much to miners instead of just opting for fiat at that point unless there was an absolute imperative need to do so, which at $20 is clearly not the case. I should know I did it.

I've been in this for a long time and the only time tx fees were above $20 was when the Bcash fork happened and Ver/Jihan spammed the network. I paid $25 tx fee on behalf of a new customer (merchant I just on-boarded) that was panicking because they didn't understand mining fee priority (I did explain it to them) and thought they lost they money, when in reality the 5 sat/byte tx cleared in a weeks time and I just recovered my funds then.

I discussed it and felt absolved of responsibility but rather than lose a potential client I just begrudgingly paid the mining fee, to Antminer/Jihan no less, which added insult to injury.

This is far from ideal, and I have a stuck tx as we speak (2sat/byte were clearing without a problem until then) for a over a week now, but it just goes to show that these new billionaire class investors (Saylor) don't understand this tech at all and that they need to use their new found fortune to help flesh out LN to get it to function to its full potential without all this mempool bloat they've help create.

Mainchain (layer 1) is doing EXACTLY what we would think would happen under these conditions even after Segwit, its purposely this way as this is the trade off for security, which makes it less than ideal as a settlement network for small, low cost, individual transactions.

That's what LN is for and I wish these instituinal investment firms would understand that, to date only Jack Dorsey (an actual technologist/developer) has funded Lightening labs, while the Winklevoss, Saylors of the World just keep trying to compete for more headline grabbing media attention and ignoring this vital issue as they do not understand or care to take the time to learn this very obvious fact.

As for me, I want them to keep doing this as it gives me a better buy-in position so I'm all for it.

PS: Keep downvoting, but a 2.58 tx fee cleared in less than an hour with 5+ confirmations, thus proving my point. I think we're far from the bloat we saw back then proving Segwit worked as expected and block sizes weren't a viable option nor tenable a solution to our problem, which I sincerely remains one of LN progress .