I'm pretty much certain that the scalability issues can't be solved soon enough for the exponential trendlines to hold. My old back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested a max price of $400/BTC in the long term, unless the MAX_BLOCK_SIZE issue is solved. Of course it can momentarily shoot to 10 times that.
um what scale ability issues? Its just moving a decimal point for price. I think it will go the other way, price will go up which will drive solutions, because there is more money on offer. Also processing fees will drop as the price goes up because btc it worth more.
finally block size can be increased
As of now, the maximum block size that's going to be relayed by Bitcoin nodes is 1MB, which corresponds to about 7 transactions per second. If there's demand for more than that, fees will start to limit who gets to use the blockchain.
If Bitcoin's popularity grows tenfold, we'll actually hit the limit and see its consequences. If bitcoin is deemed useful despite this restriction, expect to see a minimum fee for ANY TRANSACTION of several dollars.
Currently there is no consensus among developers on whether this restriction will EVER be lifted.
I agree scalability is an issue, but its mainly an issue for bitcoin as a medium of exchange, if people mainly want to use bitcoin as a store of value, you don't need that many transactions. Regardless, resolving scalability problems would obviously have a positive impact on price.
A hundred million people using Bitcoin as a savings plan and making each one monthly transaction would mean a transaction rate of 38 tps. With the 1M limit we can sustain only some 18 million such savers.
I am patient enough to wait until 2016, 2017 or 2018. Maybe some others are not though? I guess there are reasons why some need to sell earlier than that.
