Please support your assertion that 2-5 cents will buy something to eat.
Where in the world can you buy a snack for 5 cents? AFAIK not even Thailand/Cambodia/Nepal/India have such cheap food. IIRC 35 cents is about the lowest you can go for a meal's worth of calories.
If you know better, share the specifics and I'll update Numbeo accordingly.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/photos/food-price-comparison-around-the-world/#!fullscreen&slide=988845
That's ~3 cents per egg btw (for India).
Nice try. You have to buy a dozen eggs to get them for 3 cents each.
(Morpheus meme kicks in) What if I told you that in a large percentage of the rest of the planet, people don't buy coca colas and beers by the 6packs, eggs by the dozens, and fuel by the gallon?
What do you think about the analysis indicating each BTC tx uses about $6-$8 worth of electricity, in the context of these outrageous 3-cent fees?
Westerners / people of developed countries are lucky enough to not even have to care about such low fees, hence why I'm condemning the hypocrisy of "ohh fees are too high", "who cares for bloat, let's just buy larger hard disks for hundreds of $$$" and then also raising the point of how easy it is to "destroy value" by reckless moves - and this happens because BTC is unappreciated.
As for those who live in developing countries and value these 3 cents proportionately more they won't complain because they'd lose 100 times that using legacy payment systems to move money around the planet. Immigrants from developing countries know this kind of exploitation by first hand experience, while transferring money back to their countries. This means that while a 3 cent fee might hurt them more, a 30$ fee saving (for using btc instead of western union) would mean (comparatively) enormous savings for them - or a day's of work doing the dishes in some western restaurant. Yes, in that context, they'd happily pay the 3 cents instead of 30$.
As for the 6-8$ of electricity, naturally, tx/s, fees and btc price will rise to compensate. In 4.5 years (post halving for 6+ btc per block) we may be doing 20-50 tx/s instead of 3, and in 8.5 years (post the 3+ btc per block) we may be upwards of 50-100tx/s, on-chain.
This will reduce the pressure for serious fees per tx but if the gains compared to legacy systems are great (and typically they will), then people will be outbidding one another to get the biggest savings by using BTC - so even if the fees don't need to be high, they may end up being high if on-chain tx/s capacity can't scale that much. Right now we are averaging 600-800$ per tx with inclusion costs of 1 to 5 cents, depending the priority. This could escalate to thousands per tx when dust is eliminated, and tens of thousands as people start to flock to BTC to save big money from the legacy systems. In terms of annual money movement, BTC will be doing trillions per year at that point, dwarfing the western unions and paypals. At a 150-230mn/day current pace, we are currently at levels comparable with western union, despite all the wasteful dust txs which drag the average down. And the tx cost is extremely low still.