Hi,
Even just a year ago bitcoin was useable... now the fees are about 10x what the banks charge. Seems like its changing from a peer-to-peer money system for everyone into yet another convenient way for rich people to exchange funds!
What went wrong> And more to the point, who is responsible? What can be done to fix it?
Bitcoin was designed this way. Bitcoin has two scarcity parameters:
1) the limited number of coins (21 million in the end) --> high market price of a coin
2) the limited amount of room on the block chain (1 MB per 10 minutes) --> high price of a byte on the block chain.
It might very well be that what becomes the ultimate expensive thing, is "room on the block chain" and not so much the "token that you need to write stuff on that block chain". In as much as the fundamental economical value of bitcoin is its "immutable ledger" (to record stuff in), and not so much the token that goes around on it, the really expensive stuff will be the "byte on the block chain" and not a bitcoin.
The scaling difficulties reside in the fact that it is difficult to find consensus on releasing a scarcity parameter that constitutes the wealth of part of the community. Increasing the block size, is somewhat akin to increasing the number of coins. It would be very difficult to come to a consensus to augment the 21 million coins to, say, 5 billion coins. Because the holders of bitcoin wouldn't like their expensive holdings to be debased.
In the same way, the "producers of block chain" that can sell the limited amount of room at increasing prices (the fees) are reluctant to debase their wealth, which is scarcity of room they can sell, in a specific way.
For the moment, the scarcity is not the leading "market price" in bitcoin: most people still think that the valuable thing in bitcoin is the token (a bitcoin) and not the "byte on the chain". So the second scarcity parameter is still less "sacred" than the first. But with increasing fees, the importance of the value of a byte on the chain will make this more and more THE value proposition of the bitcoin chain, and bitcoin will then simply be an application token to pay your fee to buy bytes on the chain.