Dispose of the last, easiest point first: By 2040 we are either in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, or no metal is very precious any longer, due to cheap energy, LENR transmutation, and/or asteroid mining. Any postulated PM bubble has to play out before a post-scarcity future arrives. 2030 seems safe, 2050 seems unsafe, against such a development.
Funny story. This is exactly this line of reasoning that pushed me over the margin and caused me to purchase my bitcoin so many years ago.
The other two are tightly coupled. As long as obligations are due and denominated in a given numeraire, that currency will have a corresponding demand. As long as there is a demand denominated in a given numeraire, a supply will arise to preclude arbitrage. That is how a currency economy expresses social capital as liquidity. If there were frictionless exchange - and due to trivial technical innovation, there will be, for all the transparent public chains - one currency would be as good as another for commerce, and all would merge into one pool of effective liquidity. But at some critical level of friction at the exchange margin, economies will segregate by currency. Certainly we see this kind of coarse-graining even in fiat economies, where the only cause of exchange friction is rent-seeking regulatory capture! How much more so when there are sound fundamental, cum technological, reasons for it?
Given that certain - inelastic demand - goods will always be denominated preferentially in XMR, it will always have a distinct PQ and V, hence M. (I cannot say the same of, e.g., BTC.) The harder it is to exchange into and out of XMR, the more certain it is that the XMR economy will self-sustain, because it will not leak utility at the exchange margin. Contrast Zcash, which can, trivially, be integrated with the global transparent liquidity pool, and hence has no compelled reserve demand in the long run (nor, I would argue, any risk-averse demand in the short run, for entirely separate reasons).
In short, the 80 tn USD white market global economy may be well served by the transparent liquidity of trivial exchange and unlimited dilution, but the 20 TUSD black market will not be, at least not as easily or as soon. Moreover, a strictly opaque chain will require some non-trivial protocol advance, not yet in evidence, to allow liquidity to efficiently flow across exchange with transparent chains. Thus we can conclude with substantial probability that there will be a dominant opaque chain, even after Bitcoin is diluted into effective oblivion.
None of that should be taken to mean that a migration to PM reserve and crypto liquidity does not occur, over the next decade or two - only, that it's occurrence does not harm Monero, at least not at the order of magnitude in degree that transparent chains without a natural monopoly will be harmed.
So if I understand correctly. You are saying that all the public chains will merge into one pool of liquidity due to a ~ 0 transaction cost environment for moving liquidity between chains but that monero will be somewhat protected from this since moving liquidity between chains will have a sort of friction resulting from the transaction cost resulting from information leak. Do I have this right?
If so than I think it is not an apples to apples comparison. Couldn't many more opaque chains come into existence and have 0 friction with monero and rob us of our liquidity just like happened to bitcoin?
