> Let's just say there is consensus over what the Bitcoin blockchain is, versus whatever the "Bitcoin Cash" or "Bitcoin ABC" blockchain is.

The consensus is the chain which has the most accumulated work. And also, the one which is backward compatible with the one which previously had the most accumulated work. A backward incompatible fork is a shitcoin.

> Users can't ignore the interest of miners, even if miners are a tiny minority. Miners may not even have any holdings.

You have this backwards. It is miners who cannot ignore the interest of the users. Miners can only profit by selling the bitcoin that people want to buy, and the bitcoin people want to buy is the one which is inflation-free. The market decides the correct chain and the miners follow it.

Miners can't orchestrate a fork because they need consent from the users, and they won't get it. If a majority attempted to mine a forked chain, the minority chain would just become unfairly cheap to mine (due to difficulty reduction), and cause more people to mine it again. In the mean time, the miners who forked away would be making nothing, as they have no market to sell their shitcoins into.

> A core value proposition of Bitcoin is that it's the "most secure" network. If a majority of hashing power is priced out of operation because of low block rewards and low fees, that security flies right out of the window. This situation would have a far more significant impact on price than a little bit of controlled inflation.

If bitcoin cannot be sustained by fees alone, the experiment is a failure. There is little advantage to "digital fiat" which cannot be done in other ways without the inefficient blockchain.

However, there is also the acute possibility that mining is not profitable, but still performed. The reason is simply that it is a way to recover some money from energy which would otherwise be completely wasted. Consider production flaring in the extraction of crude oil. Energy companies can recover some of the loss by deploying mobile bitcoin miners, which already exist on the market today. There is also the potential for miners to be data furnaces, whose electricity costs can be partially recovered through fees, which may be utilized anywhere that heating is required.

> It's not going to be alternative software, it's going to be a software update, through the official channels. It also likely would only affect full nodes, and the majority of Bitcoin users haven't been running full nodes for a while.

The majority of users don't need to run full nodes, but there are sufficient full nodes that they don't have to. It also happens that the people running full nodes are the bitcoin maximalists who understand bitcoin and are even less likely to accept any inflation attempts than those who are running SPV nodes.

> It's really up to a few key stakeholders, not Bitcoin users in general. When faced with the decision of giving up network security versus maybe losing a little bit of value to inflation, they will choose the former, because they're not that stupid.

If multiple software clients are running on the network, then none of them will have an absolute majority. It is questionable whether developers of Bitcoin Core will roll an auto update feature into the software, which means there will always, very likely, be a majority of users running old software. The new software can only introduce backward compatible features or it will fork the minority of users who upgrade away from the network. Auto-update is an implicit backdoor and unlikely to be installed by competent users, especially where significant amounts of money are concerned.

> A similar thing already happened with Ethereum, the rules were changed mid-game in the official client, the loser fork (Ethereum Classic) was the one that kept the old rules intact.

That's because Ethereum is a personality cult and not an experiment in sound money.

Bitcoin maximalists have developed a culture of weeding out such personalities.

It is unlikely that a hard-forked bitcoin will ever gain traction. The SegWit rollout demonstrated that it is possible to perform sophisticated upgrades without breaking backward compatibility, and this mindset is now the default for all developers left on Bitcoin. Those with the mindset that they are in charge, rather than the market, have all left.

> You have this backwards. It is miners who cannot ignore the interest of the users. Miners can only profit by selling the bitcoin that people want to buy, and the bitcoin people want to buy is the one which is inflation-free. The market decides the correct chain and the miners follow it.

The Bitcoin people will want to buy is the one with a network that hasn't collapsed. That's far more important than a little bit of inflation. Other cryptocurrencies without a fixed supply are successful as well, it's not the most important factor.

> If a majority attempted to mine a forked chain, the minority chain would just become unfairly cheap to mine (due to difficulty reduction), and cause more people to mine it again.

If a majority is priced out of mining, the network would be vulnerable to a 51% attack and blocks would take long time to mine until difficulty adjusts. What's that going to do to the value of Bitcoin, the "most secure" of all the networks?

> If bitcoin cannot be sustained by fees alone, the experiment is a failure.

If Bitcoin cannot be sustained by fees alone, block reward will return. What else do you think is going to happen, everyone will just give up on Bitcoin and make it become worthless, rather than accept inflation?

> That's because Ethereum is a personality cult and not an experiment in sound money.

The market has decided Ethereum Classic is not the way to go. I don't think that's down to a personality cult. The "code is law" attitude on the other hand is pure ideology.

> It is unlikely that a hard-forked bitcoin will ever gain traction. [..] Those with the mindset that they are in charge, rather than the market, have all left.

It will gain traction through the market if the situation that I described should arise.

> What else do you think is going to happen, everyone will just give up on Bitcoin and make it become worthless, rather than accept inflation?

Precisely. Bitcoin with inflation is just fiat money, but less efficient. If there is a cabal which can set an inflation policy, then it would be more efficient to just let them run the show and do away with the mining process. Would be kinda like what we have today.

Bitcoin will only succeed if it is superior money to fiat, and the way that it is superior money is its hardness to inflate.

In fact, if a policy of inflation were to be necessary, then better than what we have today would be one where people can vote on the policy, or at least, elect those who decide it. What we have today is a system where the people making the decisions are unelected and unaccountable. Bitcoin with a cabal of miners deciding the policy would be no improvement whatsoever.

> Bitcoin will only succeed if it is superior money to fiat, and the way that it is superior money is its hardness to inflate.

Currency that can't be inflated in times of a liquidity crisis is inferior. That's exactly what happened during the great depression - the gold standard only exacerbated the problem.

Sure, some Bitcoiners have such a narrow understanding of economics that they think the permanently fixed supply is somehow really important. It's not.

Think about it, why would you not want inflation? Because you want a stable currency! There's no other reason. Yet, for cryptocurrencies, the amount of inflation barely affects price at all.

What affects the price is mainly speculation. It's far more important that the system be stable than the fact that maybe over 10 years the supply of Bitcoin grows by another 10% or 20%. It's far more important that people actually use the system to conduct trade, creating actual demand for Bitcoin. Long-term inflation just doesn't matter for trade. It may matter for investors, but investing long-term in a currency is total nonsense.

I think your definition of failure is "people who believe in certain things abandon it". Sure, maybe that'll happen, but that doesn't mean the network is going to disappear or that Bitcoin will become worthless. It's going to adapt against beliefs that threaten its survival.

> Currency that can't be inflated in times of a liquidity crisis is inferior.

Inferior to whom?

The problem of MMT is it thinks that the collective is more important than the individual.

Individuals who save money for a rainy day don't need inflation - they've already accounted for potential liquidity crises. The fact that the rest of you can't save is not my problem, it is yours. Please deal with it without devaluing my savings, thanks.

> Sure, some Bitcoiners have such a narrow understanding of economics that they think the permanently fixed supply is somehow really important. It's not.

It's not important to you. What you lack in understanding of economics is the most basic tenet - that value is subjective. The entire field of Austrian economics, which largely gets ignored by mainstream "economists", is based upon this.

Fixed supply is important to savers of money, who don't want to see their savings devalued. Instead of their savings decaying with time, there's fair chance that they'll appreciate in value due to increased demand and deflation due to lost wallets.

> What affects the price is mainly speculation. It's far more important that the system be stable than the fact that maybe over 10 years the supply of Bitcoin grows by another 10% or 20%. It's far more important that people actually use the system to conduct trade, creating actual demand for Bitcoin.

You're still ignoring that saving is a valid use of money. Demand for bitcoin is almost entirely driven by people wanting to save and/or profit from the market for exchange. The "spending" use case just doesn't really exist yet - there's little demand because people can already do this with fiat money. Bitcoin just doesn't bring big enough benefits for spending yet, and people don't want to spend it because it is harder money and they'd rather spend the softer money first (Gresham's Law).

> Long-term inflation just doesn't matter for trade. It may matter for investors, but investing long-term in a currency is total nonsense.

Saving is investing. You are investing in the medium of storage retaining its purchasing power over time. When you hold a stack of USD, you are investing in the dollar. If you suspected that the dollar was not going to retain its purchasing power, then you would certainly not invest in it. The dollar is just a commodity like any other.

Saving in BTC and saving in dollars are the same kind of "investment", except one of them is very likely to always lose some purchasing power over time and makes a poor investment. The other one is risky for now, but it's purchasing power is subject only to conditions of the market and not the decisions of unelected bureaucrats.

> I think your definition of failure is "people who believe in certain things abandon it". Sure, maybe that'll happen, but that doesn't mean the network is going to disappear or that Bitcoin will become worthless. It's going to adapt against beliefs that threaten its survival.

The issue is, as you've suggested yourself, that bitcoin just isn't used that much for spending. It is not going to survive as a medium for exchange if people aren't using it as such. Bitcoin would become worthless because it no longer offers the benefits over fiat money. The "programmable money" thing is complete hogwash that doesn't need an expensive and inefficient blockchain to perform - it can be done with centralized services offering fiat.

Bitcoin is savings technology. There will be plenty of ways for people to spend bitcoin in future, but I suspect that once people become exposed to it, their time preference will rapidly decrease and they'll probably find themselves spending less.

> The problem of MMT is it thinks that the collective is more important than the individual.

Who said anything about MMT? I'm taking the monetarist position of Milton Friedman here.

> Individuals who save money for a rainy day don't need inflation - they've already accounted for potential liquidity crises. The fact that the rest of you can't save is not my problem, it is yours. Please deal with it without devaluing my savings, thanks.

I don't think you understand what a liquidity crisis is. Your view of economics seems to be that of a caricature of an early Austrian.

> Fixed supply is important to savers of money, who don't want to see their savings devalued. Instead of their savings decaying with time, there's fair chance that they'll appreciate in value due to increased demand and deflation due to lost wallets.

The point of a currency is not savings. Currencies are neither investments nor stores of value. If you want to invest, buy assets. If you want a store of value, buy gold.

If individuals are so financially uneducated that they put their savings in currency, that's not my problem.

> When you hold a stack of USD, you are investing in the dollar.

No you're not. The stack of dollars doesn't do anything. It doesn't pay rent. It doesn't pay interest. It doesn't pay dividends. It doesn't appreciate. It's not an investment.

> The "programmable money" thing is complete hogwash that doesn't need an expensive and inefficient blockchain to perform - it can be done with centralized services offering fiat.

Sure, but those are controlled systems. Bitcoin is really good for one thing: Speculating on cryptocurrencies. Sure, you can trade BTC and maybe a handful other cryptocurrencies on ordinary broker platforms, but if you want to gamble on the latest shitcoin, the easiest thing is to just deposit some BTC on an unregulated trading platform.

> Bitcoin is savings technology.

That's a narrative that people came up with to deal with the fact that Bitcoin failed as a currency. It makes no sense. Bitcoin is a highly volatile speculative asset. There is no intrinsic value, no intrinsic demand in "rare numbers" like Bitcoin, no matter how "scarce" they are or whether the supply is fixed.

> If Bitcoin cannot be sustained by fees alone, block reward will return.

Somewhere in the next 20 years, before Bitcoin has another 5 halvings (which would reduce the reward to 0.195312 BTC), I expect there will be a proposal for Bitcoin LTS (Long Term Security, sounds better than Bitcoin TE for Tail Emission) which will be a Hard Fork to end further halvings. The ensuing debate could make the 2015 scaling debate look pretty tame...