[ballofrubber]

Also I might add that the probability that the layers that people will use will be open source is very high. This inherently makes it more accessible to everyone.

If we look at the Lightning Network (a 2nd layer solution), there are 3 mainstream solutions, all open source.

On top of that you can have something like chaumian ecash, which is even more privacy preserving and cheaper.

Yes, we will need layers on top of Bitcoin, but thats a good thing. The base layer needs to be expensive (small blocks) in order to keep the cost of running a node as low as it is now (<$100)