When it gets solved either (or any) way, the likely result is relief on the markets and a nice boom in bitcoin prices. Cf. XMR had the emission issue which first demolished the price to 1/4 of the previous, and when it was solved, price rose back to 0.004.
This assumes that a solution that does not radically alter the Bitcoin social covenant by increasing the total number of Bitcoins above 21,000,000 is actually possible. Can this problem be solved in a POW coin? Yes Monero has done this. Monero's solution involves a penalty on the block subsidy for creating a oversize block, when compared to median blocksize of a recent number of blocks. This means that in order to increase the blocksize to add transactions there has to be enough fees to compensate the miner for the partial loss of the block subsidy. The results is a properly functioning supply and demand market. If demand increases this results in an increase in price
which leads to an increase in supply. What is critical here is that in order for this to work there has to be a block reward, so a tail emission as in Monero is a must. I believe the chance of a viable solution for Bitcoin, that does not alter the Bitcoin emission, being found, let alone accepted by the Bitcoin community is less than 1%.
The emission issue in Monero was fundamentally different because the Monero community was choosing between two perfectly good options. In the Bitcoin case we have a choice between multiple options that
do not work.
Our current lull is due to everyone thinking they have enough, and perhaps renewed hope in BTC, not many newcomers coming, 0.9 delayed and situation is not known except to a few (and others cannot decipher their statements nor believe they are truthful), and even because CK has not yet opened to general public.
CK can grow 20x or more and the Monero network would be able to scale to accommodate it; however this is not the case for many Bitcoin businesses.
