Fees aren't prohibitively expensive today... but that means we have near 0 potential for growth... it's not a coincidence that the exponential uptrend in price has been thoroughly broken. Also, no coincidence that alts are exploding (lucky iCE), taking massive share from BTC.
Massive share in what? The transactions conducted in other blockchains are few. Actually these blockchains SHOULD be used more, especially by applications that are currently spamming the BTC blockchain.
Price movement of altcoins is mostly irrelevant as it doesn't deal with fundamentals. For example Ethereum scales worse than BTC and will definitely not run for free / near-zero-cost, otherwise it is a completely broken system. So what exactly is the market "rewarding" in Ethereum? It's superior scaling or finding solutions that don't exist in bitcoin? No.
The fee structures in general in altcoins, are typically worse than BTC. Ethereum, for example, considers the low fee model of bitcoin as broken in terms of dealing with abuse and bloating/centralization.
Monero has been extensively abused by bloat attacks that almost killed them and had to raise fees.
Litecoin has in place certain anti-spam fees that aren't in Bitcoin.
DASH has various fees in place as abuse disincentives in its subsystems.
Near free txs = Near free abuse. For anonymous coins => near free txs = near free sybil attack vector to unmask mixing parties, plus near free bloat for the lolz by the mixing which multiply hard disk use.
It's obvious to everyone after 6 months of debating that Blockstream wants a constrained on-chain environment to artificially incentivize off-chain solutions...
Satoshi put the 1MB in place. Not "Blockstream".
The offchain solutions or sidechains, are just a necessity to deal with the technological problem of scaling. When even at 2MB blocks - if you leave the code as it is, you can get validation times of >10 minutes, that's not blockstream's fault. When even if you "deal" with the quadratic explosion by crippling some stuff, you still hit similar hurdles if you go to higher block size numbers, in terms of propagation times, that's not blockstream's fault.
If the internet had 100TBps lines instead of 100GBps, and CPUs were way faster, and disks were way bigger, we might be laughing at all this right now - as will people of the future reading us. But right now the problem is real - there is nothing artificial about it. And the only people doing work to fix it are core devs (see, for example, validation time improvements to help it scale).
As for ROI, I don't know how many Bitcoins they actually own, but even if a portion of this money has been invested in Bitcoin, and Bitcoin goes way higher in price as a result of proper development work being conducted, then it's not impossible to see very impressive ROIs.
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