Excellent post, Central.
I have a few questions, if you don't mind answering them.
bitcoin actually keeps up in value for you to be able to afford higher cost of rent, education, healthcare, vacations, etc. (due to its beautiful combination of scarcity, a ceiling of 21mill coins, immutable, permissionless->not controlled/influenced, secure, and being established/developed).
is it possible that someday that the groups influencing bitcoin (those controlling mining or those involved with coding development, or the rest buy/transacting in bitcoin) would (either out of ignorance/misunderstanding or out of vested-interest to undermine bitcoin) start demanding (even slight) changes that may contradict the store-of-value that bitcoin is???
That is the big question that if the answer starts looking like yes
then value would plummet as bitcoin no longer be seen as a store of value but would eventually turn into another app coin (i.e. Ethereum) that can do many amazing things but not the one store-value amazing thing that it has done these past few years. the price would be zero-bound (compared to what weve been accustomed to with bitcoin today).
The price of litecoin has historically been low in comparison to Dash or Ethereum.
Could litecoin's lower price be attributed to its lack of scarcity? Litecoin's 84 million coin cap versus Dash 15 mill.
There's a youtube clip where Roger Ver of bitcoin unlimited says he wants to make bitcoin *more* available to everyone worldwide, to a point where its normal for people to use btc to buy coffee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIA8w5tfr70
There are also some who support transforming btc into a global currency.
This might be interpreted to imply, their goal is to eventually uncap the btc hard limit on coins and increase supply, which would reduce scarcity.
Am I right in thinking, if reducing scarcity didn't work well for litecoin, it could be catastrophic for btc?
Am I incorrect in thinking a higher btc cap would be necessary for bitcoin to be a truly globalized currency?
The concept of btc globalization seems opposed to some of the points you made.
What about bigger block-size?
If there were attackers spamming transactions, it is a lot more digestible to withstand 1mb blocks, but bigger blocks could open door for bigger spam, larger bloat of the blockchain - hindering small folk and consolidate power to the well resourced.
Also, say if most the mining competition were to go-away for some reason, you or myself can take a standard computer and internet connection and be able to mine-away with a 1mb block.
..if you were to double this to 2mb block, or even larger, this becomes a lot more difficult over time and our standard internet connections would begin to be much less adept for throughput required.
such a move in block-size would again consolidate power to the well-resourced.
Very interesting points!