With the ability for cryptos to perform hard forks as we have seen with ETH, it seems like technical problems are more or less irrelevant to the worth of a given coin - if there is enough demand then some developers will step up and give the coin the features people want, and then after the hard fork people will have the same amount of coin with much more capability.
This is somewhat ironically a pretty depressing comment, because it implies that the overall community genuinely wants Bitcoin to have the technological characteristics it currently has.
Not the community so much as that Bitcoin has mathematicians and competent cryptographers working on mission critical software. What you see with moving fast and breaking things and numerous forks in other coins is not bright.
Yes the community. What nexuist is claiming is that the community will move to whatever coins support the features they want, because anyone can fork Bitcoin and get the exact same core technology that all of those experts built, along with whatever extra features they want.
So if what nexuist is saying is true, then that means that the majority of the Bitcoin community is happy with the features Bitcoin has, which is depressing because the technology behind it has been generally outclassed by multiple other coins at this point. Bitcoin isn't really leading the pack right now on transaction fees, transaction time, or (especially) privacy.
But the community hasn't wholesale moved to coins like ZCash, Monero, or Mobilecoin, which (if nexuist is right) implies that they're OK with Bitcoin's current privacy guarantees, which are frankly pretty bad.
This does not imply that they are okay with Bitcoin's privacy guarantees because my post also does not imply that people are using Bitcoin as a currency. I think any discussion on crypto has to be conscientious of the fact that quite a large portion of the market cap is filled by speculative investors who are using the coin's price as a financial instrument, rather than as a payment provider.
This is even more obvious with Dogecoin which is accepted at maybe a handful of physical locations around the entire world - far less than Bitcoin, which is itself still pitiful in terms of commerce adoption rate.
The point of my original post was to say, in the event that the coin does start being used as an actual currency, and people do start having complaints about its technical limitations, that does not mean that it will automatically flop back down to worthlessness, because the procedure of hard forking would enable a development community to "fix" the coin and solve whatever problems arise. Bitcoin has been very useful this way as its blockchain was the first to reach an unmanageable size, leading to lots of innovative solutions to increase speed while decreasing disk space. Other coins, obviously wanting to compete with BTC, are incentivized to produce these solutions which can then be adopted by all other coins, improving the entire space at once. The open source nature (requirement, really) of crypto clients also means that nobody can hide their improvements behind an opaque backend - the code has to be visible to everyone, and everyone has to be able to fork it, meaning that everyone gets to use it.
