"Bitcoin Core has no code in it to handle a permanent and growing transaction backlog. "
what happens when transactions are super slow as fuk, hence a ultimate incident way back when.
transaction fees will rise and block size will expand . no other solution works.
transaction fees are the only way to kill off spam transactions.
The fees are indeed super cheap at the moment. Throw 1$ in fees for your transaction and it will confirm quickly.
I'm not so familiar with all the technicality of expending the block size and not so sure about why it is so controversial.
Pushing the upper limit of the block to 8mb doesn't mean each block will use it all.
As for the price rise, BTC's first price was based of the cost of mining one BTC with CPU back in the time. Since bitcoin now can easily be acquired by other means then mining it, this is hard to tell for sure how much influence it will have on the price.(The halving) As someone said before. Offer and demands normally rules the price but in this case, since all the miners introduce fresh money, I think it will push it up.
Let's see how the LTC react until his halving. For now, the price is just insanely going up. Pretty sure a massive sellout will come around the corner. I'm no specialist at all in economics, so this is only my 2 cents but the price has to go down and correct himself for sure ... But who knows ! The price will go up until the demand is high and it looks like the halving has something to do with the current insane uptrend.
Then the I" wish i knew and bough 50000$ LTC at 1.25$" (or whatever low price it was like 5-6 weeks ago)