> you could conceivably implement lightning with classical assets.
Not with the same security properties. The idea of building a money transfer service where you simply have many people with liquidity that transfer IOUs instead of the actual money has been around since at least the 8th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
There was no formal ultimate settlement layer though.
I personally think that we need to continue to investigate ways to push what we trust and eventually have a workable system that actually trusts individual public keys to not double spend on pain of losing their reputation.
Until that happens I'll continue to hold some BTC.
That's not blockchain, and it's not crypto. You can do that right now with literally any asset in an InteractiveBrokers account.
The hope for scaling bitcoin is on stuff like the lightning network and other more esoteric stuff like coinjoin. That being said lighting network could scale arbitrarily in theory, but the security properties depend on being able to tx on the main chain in a timely manner. In the case that there is a wide spread theft attempt on the lighting network we could see many LN channels trying to be closed at the same time and shooting the fees up beyond the attack value.