For example, it is Ver and Brigade's argument that bitcoin's price and value will die off if the user experience is such that the rising fees cause them to flee...Is this not an admission of inflation control?
I think there are a lot of different dimensions of the problem all tangled up in each other which need ot be decoupled in order to properly prioritise them.
1. PAYMENT SYSTEMS vs STORES OF VALUE
First of all, the user experience and the monetary model are independent of each other IMO. This speaks to the difference between a payment system and a store of value.
People sitting at home watching the value of their bitcoin holdings double in a year could care less about the user experience. On the other hand someone waiting in a checkout queue at the supermarket will not go back to that same supermarket if they're made to wait 5 minutes for their credit card to clear.
This conflict is easily resolved by decoupling payment systems from the store of value that they carry. For example the Visa network lets merchants "get the trade out of the way" in an instant but the clearing time of the underlying capital may take a day or two. That doesn't mean that Visa is now suddenly a new form of money, it's just that it's a trade facilitator.
Cryptocurrency exchanges do the same thing. They perform the trades off-chain so that they are independent of the particular blockchain characteristics of the underlying asset. So, for example if you're on Poloniex, an Ether trade - which has a block time of x seconds can be cleared just as fast as a Bitcoin one which has maybe a 20 minute block time.
2. DEFLATIONARY vs INFLATIONARY MONETARY MODELS
I already posted my more detailed thought on this earlier so there isn't much to add here except to emphasize that - to me - concerns about payment fees and useability are not really part of the monetary model debate. Bitcoin's monetary model is fixed and can't be changed. It's a type 2, deflationary store of value and not designed for price stability. In fact if it was keeping prices stable it wouldn't be doing its job because you couldn't then store value against prices denominated in the prevailing national currency.
3. HARDFORKS vs NO FORKS and the ROGER VER CONCERNS
This is where I think things are more political and subjective. I just think that Roger Ver has confused bitcoin's role as a store of value with its potential to function as a payments system. Although the latter is 'handy', it definitely isn't one of bitcoin's strengths (or any blockchain' strength for that matter). An SQL server can perform far better as a payment system than bitcoin can, however I would say one thing in favour of Ver's arguments which does have a monetary dimension:
That is that the one thing that bitcoin does that no other asset has been able to do hitherto is perform the function of
bearer instrument on an electronic network. That is to say you can exchange 2 attributes of the trade instead of just 1:
• ownership
• possesion
Gold performed this function in the age of physical markets. It was a "physical bitcoin". But prior to 2009, only ownership could be traded electronically and that was a huge obstacle to global asset trading because you needed the trusted party. That's bitcoin's strength - asset mobility. Doesn't really matter if it takes 20 minutes to confirm from that perspective because the fact that you can do it at all is so huge.
Given that background, however, there is also a "usability issue" to some extent. i.e.people to need to move bitcoin around the place and there are many cases where slow confirmation simply inhibits certain business models so I do think it's an issue, but for useability, not for store of value.
4. MY OPINION
IMHO Ver already has his hardforks - they're called altcoins. They should just leave bitcoin alone because that seems to be what the people who hold it want (those using it as a store of value rather than a payment system). Even though I sympathize with many of Ver's concerns, I don't really see much difference in an altcoin and a bitcoin hardfork that significantly changes its properties. They're both clones effectively.
Another area where he doesn't seem quite consistent is the fact that he says bitcoin should be "for everyone". The problem with that is that any scarce resource is going to be difficult to attain for most people and he's one of the people making it scarce by holding onto a huge chunk of the coin supply. He says he uses it "all the time" but doesn't acknowledged there's a huge difference between the propensity to use it when you have a surplus of it and when you don't. If I had 100,000 bitcoins (or whatever his holding is) I'd be using it "all the time" as well. On the other hand a guy with 0.2 BTC who's hoping it might help him out in his retirement might not be so worried about confirmation times.
It all comes down to WHY people want it and my first point about store of value vs payment systems. Payment systems are a redundant resource (easy to reproduce cheaply), stores of value are not.
