Bitcoin was not designed to be “maximally profitable to miners”, it was designed to be a currency that could not be captured and controlled by state actors or other large players yet would be able to sustain itself and its network by incentivizing miners to set up nodes and resist attempts at hostile takeovers of the network. [1]
No other solution has managed to achieve this. There are proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies that opt to be more easily scalable on L1 at the cost that they are controllable by whoever holds the largest stakes.
The fact that I personally know people keeping hundreds of thousands of dollar-equivalent-sats on Lightning, who are happy with that arrangement, is what I'm balancing against that guy on the internet with strong opinions with 'throw' in his name.
But hey maybe you know what you're talking about. It's possible. I don't.
Regarding my name: The short explanation is, I have a throwaway account in protest. If Satoshi's anonymity was enough to convince your friends to put down large sums of real money based solely on a hope, it should be enough for you to consider my (non-monetized) comments on this internet forum that's mostly pseudonymous anyway.
As for their happiness, I know people with a lot of Bitcoin, and I know a few people who are underwater on their BTC, but there's no overlap in those groups. They might feel a twinge around 7k, more likely, they'd buy as much as they can afford.
* support for millions of transactions per second
* very fast, basically instantaneous
* if a small fraction of transactions is dropped randomly, no big deal
* easy, simple, cheap on- and off-ramps
* support for anonymity
* good customer support (lost password, lost device, maybe chargebacks)
* support for local currency
* compatible with local law
* very simple API, easily integrated into browser or other devices
* energy efficient
For those requirements blockchain is a terrible solution.
But sure, you can use a helicopter to open a beer bottle, go ahead.
Most blockchains are worthless and have nothing in the way of transaction fees or indeed transactions. Doge is perfect for micropayments! This was a fad on reddit back in the day.
In particular, well, the title of the article says it all. If you have BTC, and you want to send a few sats and pay basically nothing, Lighting has existed for years and works just fine.
Edit: I don't think micropayments are such a great idea to begin with, but the arguments for that have nothing to do with the medium of payment: assuming a perfect micropayment system, people still won't want to use it for off-topic reasons.