I disagree: The question is what is Bitcoin the network capable of. Right now the network we have not the one we want is capable of very little. And we can't grow it or even maintain it with fees at their current level and block rewards dropping every 4 years. The Bitcoin community may grow by leaps and bounds over the next 4 years and its price may jump up to meet the level of investment miners have invested but unless we have a stable fee for miner income and reinvestment the network will fall. Transaction volume is not the issue its fees, block size is an issue about fees first then user accessibility second (transaction count) and currency usability is a distant 3rd.

You're in the minority.  Only 20% as of this moment think Bitcoin should be a store of wealth only rather than a currency also.
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/1313494.new#new

That's exactly what I said: Question is, what people use bitcoin for AND what the network is capable of doing.

Problem is there exist several different oppinions about the second question. You think bitcoin needs higher fees to survive the reward droppings. That's ok, many people think so.

But also many people believe the opposite and think that in the long-run bitcoin can only survive if it processes a lot of transactions with little fees and for that it's growth must not be cutted now by high fees. As long as there is a substantial reward and as long as price rising equals the drop in reward there is no need to let raising fees cut adoption. In some time, when reward becomes insignificant, miners have to feed themselves by fees. This will be ~2025/2030.

Either Bitcoin achieves a status of digital gold that is not usefull for daily transactions, but usefull enough to feed a constand demand for transactions with 5-10 Dollar fee.

Or it will be a combination of digital gold and a daily payment systems that is usefull enough for a constant demand of a mass of transactions with a 0.5-1 cent fee.

Both scenarios can work. You prefer the first, I prefere the second (but would be ok with the first). I think we should avoid to decide things we can't influence. Neiher me or you nor single economic actors nor the core devs are able to decide this. It's only the market.

I do not think higher fees would substantially hinder the growth of the community or its network effect as long as those fees stay between 1 and 5 USD, in the distant future when we have a better internet and a better tor network and a better bitcoin network (with stable fees) then by all means go wild.

>you have an exchange for Beanie Babies
When people see Beanie "value rise 400% per year," they'll build exchanges. Same as Bitcoin.

>Being able to produce bitcoin by yourself is a very important aspect
Oh? You mean one can spend $100 to mine $20, that sort of a thing? Because that's roughly what non-factory miners can expect.
If you want, I could create Giant's Place, a Beanie Cloudmining website, where you can pretend that you're mining Beanies while I return $20 out of each $100 you give me.
How would that be different from Bitcoin?

With 'as of this moment' he meant that the data is present and not outdated. However, I do agree that it is better than most. Polls on this forum are of near zero value considering the amount of votes and people with alts/shills. A single user could easily manipulate a poll if he or she wanted to.

Perhaps true, however the reason why many people invest is because they see a longer term vision of a highly usable currency.  If you're only investing because you think others will see it as a store of value, then it becomes ponzi-like.

More like a good old pyramid scheme, but yeah.

The example represents a severe performance bug in the bitcoin core software and should be fixed by software changes that make an inefficient operation efficient or restrict very large transactions if this proves too difficult. There is no reason to limit blocksize because of this.

Sorry for mixing this up.

Quantus thinks this, Johnyj thinks that, I think something else, and we all have in common that is completely irrelevant what we think.

Yes, allowing everybody to print money without permission WAS one of the most fascinated thing of bitcoin; but I was equal fascinated that Bitcoin is anonymous (pseudonymous), decentral and that you can send splits of a cent in seconds round the world and many more things. There is not that ONE aspect of bitcoin that needs to be preserved on cost of other aspects. There are so many aspects and so many usecases, and instead of saying "Bitcoin is made for this" we should watch with amazement what people are using bitcoin for.

You think higher fees wouldn't hinder bitcoins growth. I could present you a dozen of counter-arguments why fees between 1-5 Dollars would hinder bitcoin's growth immesively and would make bitcoin at this moment useless as a store of value.  But in fact I don't know it and maybe those fee would work.

But I know such fees would cut out some usecases I'd love to see emerge (for example, searchtrade*). So in my view cutting usecases should be more like a last resort than an option.

Edit: *if micropayment will work as private and secure with lightning, I'm completely ok with it.