main cause/trigger was bitcoin being used to buy real like stuff..
first price push was due to 'bitcoin pizza'
then shadier things like silk road
then legit things via bitpays merchant tools
then coinbase adding merchant tools
..
its not about scarcity, as there are many crap coins with more scarcity
its not about function of sending funds in ~10mins, as many crapcons can do it faster
..
but now core devs hate the idea of bitcoin used as common real world product purchasing currency.
and with the tx fee drama. and drop off of merchant adoption.. bitcoin is in a lull period where investors/community are unsure of the future real life utility of bitcoin.
Gavin Andresen believes that the “average transaction fee paid will rise, people or applications unwilling or unable to pay the rising fees will stop submitting transactions, [and] people and businesses will shelve plans to use Bitcoin, stunting growth and adoption.”
Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille replies to Andresen’s comment above:
“Is it fair to summarize this as ‘Some use cases won’t fit any more, people will decide to no longer use the blockchain for these purposes, and the fees will adapt.’? I think that is already happening […]
Furthermore, systems that compete with Bitcoin in this space already offer orders of magnitude more capacity than we can reasonably achieve [...]
I don't know what subset of use cases Bitcoin will cater to in the long term. They have already changed - you see way less betting transactions
these days than a few years ago for example - and they will keep changing, independent of what effective block sizes we end up with. I don’t think we should be afraid of this change or try to stop it.”
yes the propangandist hyping sheep will promote LN, but the truth is LN is not consumer ready for the half million merchants and millions of customers that USED TO use bitcoin daily for real life things. and wont be ready any time soon.
so right now everyone is screaming to just hold, and treat btc as a store of value and ignore bitcoins original utility.. even though to have a value of store, btc needs a utility to give it value.. otherwise its just like facebook credits but on a distributed network