The risk of inserting exponential transaction growth as Gavin wants to try to sneak in as a hard fork is, to me, greater than the risk of increasing the 21 million currency base figure.
but it (sidechains) does not do that
Sidechains do not enter in to the comment. This is what Gavin proposes for Bitcoin. To me it guarantees that Bitcoin will at some point be controlled by a small number of high powered organizations (unless the hard-fork is rolled back out by another hard fork or Bitcoin fails for other reasons.)
Quote
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Albert A. Bartlett
Smart people understand this shortcoming and use it to advantage regularly.
I consider my holding in Bitcoin as a function of 'future value' no different than my holdings in other things. Thus, I have to mark the future value of Bitcoin down in conjunction with my expectations of it's evolution. People think who think at all probably think, 'oh, it's 10 years out before it becomes a problem.' Bitcoin is already 5 years old or so, so 10 years from now isn't that long. And the technology available to me today vs. 5 years ago is not even close to matching the propositions outlined in Moore's Law.
and I disagree. the moment the 21,000,001 coin appears I'm selling all of my BTC.
I don't expect that you or almost anyone else would agree. That's why I inserted 'to me' in the statement. I have something of an orthogonal mind.