waxwing on Nostr: Your 2nd Q: the ability to transact offchain in a system with extra features is ...

Your 2nd Q: the ability to transact offchain in a system with extra features is massive: better privacy, speed, scale and trustless contracts like options and dexes. Not saying you just get that all easily, some of it's hard and some near impossible. To get that for bitcoin without sacrificing trust is a kind of holy grail. Lightning got a small part of that, with some tradeoffs, and it already massively changed the usability of bitcoin as money.