"Only invest what you can afford to lose" applies just as well to any complete technology as it does to something that's still in beta.
Remember, Bitcoin is the initial implementation of a protocol. Even if Bitcoin is a mature technology and no longer experimental, you should still invest only what you can afford to lose, because some other implementation of the protocol (yes, an altcoin) may eventually be the one that businesses settle on as being friendlier to their interests.
I think investing is different from daily use. If the only users were speculators I wouldn't have an issue with them losing everything. If you invest in junk bonds and lose it all it's your fault. The altcoins don't have much of an economy. Those are really investments (so to speak) and their users are out for a quick return. Some of the altcoins are trying new things and might have the ability to overtake Bitcoin while being more stable and safe. In that case, I hope they do leave Bitcoin. I seriously doubt big business, at this point, will jump ship and attach to an altcoin with no name recognition and no established economy.
I know it's impossible to see many problems before they happen. Some issues can be seen ahead of time and corrected. For the most part the dev team has corrected the issues quickly. Sometimes crooks can use real systemic issues as an excuse to steal as Karpeles did with transaction malleability. Is the system so well prepared now that we can scale up and invite even more use and possibly more loss until there's no one left on the earth that's willing to trust Bitcoin?
It's an easy decision for businesses to accept another payment method. It's especially easy when companies like Coinbase are offering the first million dollars of exchanges to fiat for free. Users are a different story. Users need to trust the system and benefit from it. I know low fees are a benefit and this will help. Should the system be throttled limiting the amount of new entry until it's ready for prime time, is it ready now or is there no way to know until it's ramped up? Ever increasing use means ever increasing losses when failure happens. I would hate to be the lead dev knowing I had this huge experimental market sitting on my shoulders.
I'm really not trying to be a prick. I'm just giving you food for thought. Mr. Andresen likes to reach out to the community for consensus and that's a good thing. Maybe the word community to him means only the dev team. In that case, he should really just send out an email instead.
If this thread needed more conjecture I would provide it(and in a more amusing way).
I have seen your posts and you do troll. I could go back to a thread from something and post your quote where you admit that you troll for the fun of it. You treated me badly before in a thread from the past and it is whatever honestly.
Bitcoin will need to adapt and change. I fully agree with Gavin after reading more into his posts and more on the bitcoinfoundation site. It is easy for everyone here to criticize something when they aren't even in charge of more than a few hundred K per year.
I personally Forecast/Plan for 2 production facilities and the yearly total of production is $80,000,000 to $150,000,000(just giving a range real number is in there). Supply and Demand is KING for what I do. As a Forecaster I can see Bitcoin needs this change because all signs point to there being a higher demand for transactions sometime soon, therefore supply of transactions will increase by X% as demand grows. On the supply slide of things you can then infer that transactions will grow larger in size and eventually hit a point where it is bigger than 1 MB blocks, meaning fees will need to be higher. It is not intended for fees to be so high early on, that comes later. It is a simple concept and if it is wrong there isn't exactly any consequences as it can be changed to something else that would better suit it.
Bitcoin Protocol is largely correct in many areas, other areas get improved, and the rest of the slack will be taken up by something else or another coin. Bitcoin cannot be everything any anything at the same time. Focusing on what Bitcoin does best is what Gavin is talking about for this hard fork. The main principle that wider adoption will come from ensuring fees stay low is key here. Especially since the fees are a direct result of reward + transaction volume(size and amount). So if there are too many transactions going through that it goes over 1MB consistently only the higher value fees will be taken which makes fees go up in price.