I had been quite pessimistic about BTC earlier in the year. The lack of scalability was really turning into a huge problem, and the longevity of the idea of BTC being the digital gold was really dependent on the exchanges offering mostly btc trading pairs.
However, with the onset of lightning, it seems to have a better future. I read a paper on it yesterday, and it really seems like a novel and elegant solution to the scalability problem. I am looking forward to it hitting the mainnet, it will definitely rejuvenate the ancient coin!
I go back and forth on the lightning network. I guess I'll need to see what it looks like in practice, but I don't really like the idea that you have to set up a persistent communications channel for every transaction partner.
Still, it seems like it's been working fine on LTC, so there's every reason to believe it'll do well on BTC too. They definitely need to do something, because BTC was essentially useless when the transaction fees were high.