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As it currently stands, you can onboard approximately 10% of the global population onto layer 2's until the base layer can't keep up with channels opening and closing. You can pretty much map out a decent estimate of where it just becomes unsustainable. With the addition of covenants though, you can literally onboard the entire population, and do so quickly. A full layer one won't be an issue, because the massive fees from opening and closing channels won't matter. Each channel will hold the aggregated weight of thousands or millions of transactions.
So we can map out an approximate maximum level of activitiy or fees if nothing changes. None of which matter, because the solution already exists, and there's just about a zero percent chance that people allow the network to die instead of implementing a soft fork.
Unfortunately the demand for actual Bitcoin is quite low. Most people want (or at least accept) claims on Bitcoin. Claims on Bitcoin are infinitely scalable until too many get redeemed at once. Hopefully as it becomes more of a medium of exchange this will change. I think the demand, the infrastructure build and protocol changes to meet the demand all kind of develop in unison over time. I see that as more likely than some tipping point where suddenly 1B people need to be onboarded with a few months. I could be wrong though.
It has been odd to observe this ideological shift in Bitcoin as new folks have entered the space and been totally ok with or even preferred claims on Bitcoin.
I agree that the change will meet demand way before something even remotely catastrophic happens, although I assume people will wait until after the problem already begins. It won't be a matter of needing to onboard a million people in a week, but it may be that layer 1 needs to get a lot more expensive to transact on before a solution is implemented.
As far as claims go, I think people are just lazy. It's easier to buy an ETF and let your brokerage deal with it than to buy the coins and self custody. I have no doubt though, that things are going to get a whole lot more intuitive over time. It seems like a self correcting problem.
I don't doubt that one bit. There's a lot of hurdles between now and then, including a de mininus tax rule.
The average person isn't going to use bitcoin as a means to avoid taxes and they don't want the headache of filing a million little transactions.
I think the security budget talk projects the current state of mining, fees, onchain activity into the future and I think that is somewhat of a fools errand. It's impossible to know what any of these things look like say a decade from now.
Not saying it is not worth considering but free markets and incentives tend to be great problem solvers.