Everything will run on Bitcoin BTC.
One of the reasons why many altcoins are flourishing today is that Bitcoin has high fees, and many altcoins are trying to fill up the gap left by Bitcoin, and others because of human greed and because people figure that it is much easier to print a token or coin than to go and buy an existing one.
Bitcoin BTC fixes the high transaction fees with Lightning Network, which requires users to create funded channels and has two transactions on-chain. Still, if your channel has enough liquidity and uses your channel a lot, you can upset the cost of operating your channel; everyone else who doesn't have enough funds or wants to invest in their channels will have to use custodian services. The poor will be the most that will use custodians, but if you save up, you can have your channel and have custody of your funds, but that decision will be something that each user must take.
Ethereum has been growing a lot, and they term the name DeFi pretty much they invented DeFi, ICOs, NFTs, Dexes, and much more, yet it is still Ethereum and not Bitcoin. Vitalik had to create his coin because many would say that he didn't get enough support from the BTC community because his idea would bring a lot of usage into the network. At 1MB blocks, it will be a pain for the network at that time, and others say that is because of this and after that this too. Regardless of the reason, Bitcoin BTC now has DeFi, and it can do everything Ethereum and other EVM networks can do, yet no one is talking about that.
By running RSK as a sidechain, the layer one network can continue to work with just one megabyte making it easier to run your listening node for the BTC network and for transactions as peer-to-peer and cost-saving to use LN. I am saying that Bitcoin is doing what ETH does without compromising on the decentralization of the nodes, and you can use it as a currency if you are willing to pre-funded your channel with LN.
Eventually, everything that other altcoins have will be built into Bitcoin, and it seems that that is what is happening, at least from my point of view; peer to peer gets downloaded into a second later. Defi gets into a sidechain that utilizes the original SHA-256 miners for the network's security.
When I send some satoshis utilizing a Lightning Network bridge and RSK, I use Bitcoin even when using a custodian. Suppose I want to make it more decentralized on my part. In that case, I can create my channels, and I am sending funds in the same network but different protocols, and it is geeky stuff because I am utilizing a lot of protocols simultaneously.
But what I am writing could be seen like Bitcoin BTC will dominate everything and altcoins will go to zero, that is a possibility, but in reality, I think that in the end, we will have a giant network instead of just one, where coins that lose value will be useless and less, just like it is happening with regular layer one altcoins that were thriving before 2017 but lo longer exist. That is my speculation.
I understand this article is not altcoin friendly at all, and this website is a Bitcoin Cash site, yet what I am writing is just one idea. I can be wrong, and you don't need time to tell you that because, in reality, I don't know if what I am writing will happen; what I am saying is that this article is just an exercise of my own free will and opinion and at the end it means nothing. You must do with your money what you must regardless of someone else's opinion. And by to way, Bitcoin Cash doesn't need any custodian to save on fees, and out of BTC and ETH, the transaction costs for layer one and EVM BCH is the cheapest.
This article only represents one idea that in the end may or may not be entirely wrong, so don't take it as investment advice in any way or form, and I will extend this to all my previous articles and the ones that will come in the future as well.
Ok, the BTC network is decentralized. But is Lightning decentralized, too? From my understanding the routing only works if the Lightning nodes are not acting adverserial - which means they have to be trusted. This cannot be assumed in a decentralized network. But maybe I misunderstand something.
By the way, I still don't see why BTC should be preferred over BCH.