Thank you for sharing additional insights on this. As a relatively new bitcoiner, it is helpful to me to get more perspective. I have set up two lightning nodes myself to better understand the technology and use cases and don't think it could be locked out of the base layer. The reason is that to open a channel, I simply do an on-chain transactions from my wallet to a new multi-sig wallet with the party on the other end of my channel. How would a decentralized Bticoin network prevent somebody from submitting a valid onchain transaction to open a channel?   Once opened, I can freely transaction via the Ligthning protocol using that channel until such time as either my channel partner or I want to close the channel which is another onchain transaction to settle the amount of bitcoin each of us has on our side of the chnanel.  If the channel closing transactions is valid onchain, I don't think anybody would prevent it from being added to a block.   Except perhaps miners who could figure out a 51% attack but if that happened we have bigger problems than whether L2 is working or not.