... and really some of the extent of your drama or exaggeration seems to be attempting to cause an effect rather than really talking about the real state of bitcoin today.
That's partially true and I'll be the first to admit it. I want the price to go down IF it leads to cause the core devs to implement a workable scale patch or else leads to some other group replacing them. I want bitcoin to succeed as an electronic peer to peer cash system as it was designed, not as some cloistered settlement network only used by the same assholes who run the current system.
Fiat money is debt. It is lent into existence. That makes the entire global financial system a giant pyramid scheme. I don't have to wish for economic Armageddon to see one coming (or more likely a series of disasters eventually having the same effect). I don't have to cause it or contribute to causing it. It's going to happen as a mathematical certainty. If we don't find a way to escape the system, we will go down with it.
A network capacity of seven transactions/sec is a life boat with very few seats.
Because this argument surfaces here all the time, I'll down put my thoughts on how this whole scaling issue is a problem that only exists because Bitcoin, or it's community, doesn't know to have a relationship with other coins. Let's say you have a Merchant that takes Litecoins, Quark, whatever as a peer to peer cash system at their place of business. At the end of the business day, the merchant consolidates their transactions into one Bitcoin transaction. This seems to be the same scenario that is being talked about as a 'Lightning Sidechain', except Core developers aren't invoking the dirty word of 'altcoin'. In this case, Bitcoin doesn't need to fork, because it isn't trying to be a single solution to this problem, and I'm not sure BIP 100, BIP 101 or whatever will enable Bitcoin to cope with this 'Mass Adoption' scenario anyway.
The network can only handle about half a million transactions per day reliably. Even IF we used alts for purchases and Bitcoin for settlements, it still wouldn't be fast enough. Money is useful because it eliminated the need for a double coincidence of wants under barter
. There has to be a "most marketable commodity" and that commodity is by definition "money". If ANY crypto becomes money, it can only do so if the network has the capacity to handle that function.
We're not even close to dealing with "mass adoption" yet. We need enough capacity to avoid gridlock before we even get started on that.