mass adoption will not improve bitcoin's store of value, it is quite the opposite actually, it will flood and drown it. [ ... ] but it's its scarcity both in cap and transaction that will allow it to surpass any regular investment.
Scarcity alone will not make bitcoin valuable. There is a finite and fixed supply of tickets for last month's issue of the Pennsylvania Lottery; but they are quite worthless. Ditto for Zimbabwean dollar bills, Litecoins, Dogecoins, and any other altcoin.
Back in ~Nov/2013, when I first became aware of bitcoin, the "gospel" was that bitcoin's value would derive from it capturing some fraction of the market (or the whole market) of PayPal, Visa, of the US dollar. That is what Antonopoulos and all the bitcoin gurus used to say every time. There was a slide by A. with such projections, ending with 1 BTC = 1 million USD or so -- all based on the money velocity equation (P = V x T / N, where P is the price USD/BTC, V is the volume of payments in USD/day, T is the mean number of days between reuses of the same coin, and N is the number of coins in circulation, namely 21 M BTC).
In particular, bitcoin was supposed to be much more vaulable that altcoins because of the "network effect" and the "first player's advantage", which would ensure that bitcoin, and not the altcoins, would be used for e-commerce.
it is its robustness against human miscalculations, its decentralization, its permission-less-ness and its network's security that matters.
None of these things will determine the price of bitcoin. Old PA Lottery tickets are permissionless and decentralized (you can transact them anywhere without intermediaries), not affected by human miscalculations (they are just printed pieces of paper), and quite secure (it is practically impossible to forge them so as to fool modern microanalysis equipment). But they are worthless, all the same.
that is so wrong on so many levels and in total opposition with bitcoin's fundamentals.
Bitcoin was created because
there was no system for peer-to-peer electronic payments that did not require a trusted intermediary or central authority; and Satoshi thought that he had figured out a way to build one. That is the "fundamentals" of bitcoin.
The world did not (and does not) need another speculative investment instrument, or another system for buying computers from Dell, or a police-proof system to pay for cocaine, guns, and fake passports. Destroying banks, governments, and government-issued currencies are stupid goals, because no one knows how to make a functioning society without them. Bitcoin was not created for such purposes, and none of those purposes justifies its exstence.
but for now, gavin et al had exactly what they wanted, that is dividing the community and induce fear
Please.... That is what
Blockstream did. The mess is all their fault. If you want to save bitcoin, for any purpose, you should get it out of their hands.
the rules should be set in stone, and not subject to any major modification and by anyone, or that would create a precedent.
That is not a sensible wish, not even logical.
For example, next year the block reward will be cut in half. Why isn't that that a change in the rules? If the reward is NOT halved, would that be a change?
The 1 MB size limit was meant to be raised by a hard fork, just as the reward was meant to be halved:
It can be phased in, like:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.
A congested network and a "fee market" were totally not the original design; isn't it a (big!) change to allow those things to occur?
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