Layers are the only way to scale a networking system. Every previous monetary and networking structure in history has done this same thing.

There is no reason L2 or L-whatever has to be an IOU. Sure people will use them because trust is the foundation of society. There isn’t anything wrong with IOUs, the problem is **systemic, fraudulent IOUs** that are counterfeit into the market indistinguishable from the money itself. 

Fractional reserve is a systemic structure of our money. Fractional reserve in a bitcoin world is explicitly external to the money. MtGox was fractional reserve. FTX was fractional reserve.

It’s not a matter of “we’re gonna get fractional reserve.” We’ve had it from the very beginning, and we have seen the results 100 times. They implode and go out of business. The systemic problem of fiat is that they do NOT impose, but grow like a cancer because the money itself is cheated to keep them alive.

In short, your concerns are not really relevant, because the base layer is always present to prove existence, validity, and ownership of bitcoins. That will make it behave like a global decentralized incorruptible court for who owns what.

Thus we will extremely likely (and are already doing) build 10,000 networks *on top* of #Bitcoin. 

But there are a literally limitless number of way to extend the trust of the base layer, up to any and all other layers. Ark is a great example, all transactions off chain, every single user has unilateral exit ability. 

Bitcoin will have no problem scaling because it’s an open, permissionless protocol. The base layer simply needs to be reliable, solid, and radically neutral, and there will be nothing that we cannot do with it. 

Human ingenuity doesn’t have a hard cap.