There were 4,746 FDIC insured banks as of the end of Q3 2022, and 5,099 NCUA insured credit unions as of the end of 2020. If each of those institutions does net settlement with 200 other institutions daily, you've got roughly 1 million settlements a day (each settlement has two parties, so 100 * 10,000). Earlier in the thread, someone said BTC can do 3-7 transactions a second, which doesn't quite make it to 1 million transactions per day.
Of course, I just made a wild guess about how many net settlements between banks would happen; maybe banks don't settle up from check clearing daily, but in a world where transactions are difficult to reverse and nobody trusts anyone, you'd want to settle up regularly.
Again, how many armored trucks are used for settlement each day? Probably not a million. The transaction limit on Bitcoin is artificial, the result of a negotiation between the miners, who provide the security and the users, who implicitly demand that security, by choosing Bitcoin over any other cryptocurrency. Ethereum on the other hand already processes a million transactions per day on L1.
Thanks for running the numbers. The amounts in the channels are committed with those signed transactions, there’s no opportunity to double spend, so it’s fine to settle much less than daily, as long as the net flows are well balanced (big if). Transactions hop through the graph, you don’t have to have a running tab with more than a few other nodes.
Of course, I just made a wild guess about how many net settlements between banks would happen; maybe banks don't settle up from check clearing daily, but in a world where transactions are difficult to reverse and nobody trusts anyone, you'd want to settle up regularly.