Bitcoin might get a higher fee, but it will never lose its most significant appeal in the long run: Long term saving and international remittance
Let's be honest: Bitcoin will never be able to compete with those fast&cheap mobile/3rd party payment solutions that charges 0 transaction fee and instant confirmation (you even get some bonus when using them), and the possibility of refund
For example, Sweden has already over 50% of population use mobile payment. So all of these users will feel angry when they need to pay a fee to use bitcoin to spend, besides all the hassles about exchange into and out of bitcoin
So, even if you make bitcoin 0 transaction fee + instant confirmation + refund, people would still not use bitcoin to spend, because they gain nothing from switching from existing mobile payment solutions to bitcoin. People who care about bitcoin mostly attracted by its deflative nature for value storage, and they usually buy large amount of coins, so the fee is the least concern for them (I have seen these people paying 5-10% above market price to get 1-2 bitcoin, do you think they really care about the current level of fee?)
If you consider its major advantage against existing financial system, it is clear that the best marketing for bitcoin is either its exchange rate rises (for long term saving), or more and more exchanges are available in each country (for international remittance)
Yea but thats not really why users use bitcoin now.
I get that bitcoin has like 10 features that are appealing but most people use bitcoin only for 2 things: get money online, send money online.
You can already earn fiat money on various sites, and if banks really make TX instant, it will be a big blowback to bitcoin.
I think it will be a big blowback, most people dont care about financial privacy, and control over money anyway
Do you have any data backing your claim?
You can look at my signature, there were two polls I did years ago towards the users of this forum, you can see clearly majority of the people hold their coins for a long time and they spend a little later on
And I have been working as a bitcoin broker for years, I clearly notice that over 90% of my customers never do more than 1 transaction per week, and a large part of them do one purchase per month, after the salary day. It is also possible those transactions are for international remittance, e.g. people sending money to their family once a month
The people who are interested in high frequency trading are those trading on exchanges, but that does not require the bitcoin traffic. Gamblers are also heavy users since they frequently sending small amount of bitcoin for gambling, but I think it is easy to communicate with those sites and let them change their deposit policy
Exchanges, wallet providers and gambling sites indeed have the requirement to do lots of bitcoin transaction, but since they are a few, they can easily establish their own clearing channel to dramatically reduce the traffic on bitcoin network. That's why Lightning Network seems to be a future direction, but anyway its implementation is very complex thus does not show the benefit over traditional clearing channel. It would require years of review and test before commercial use. And maybe by that time off-chain clearing is already the norm so there is no need for on-chain clearing