no it won't kill bitcoin but it will change it, and that change won't be for the better.
bitcoin will stop being a digital cash and will become something that you only buy if you have lots of money to make more money from the fluctuation of price and nothing else.
this also means we have to forget about mass adoption.
Amen.
But this was built-in from the start. First of all, the fact that there was a FINITE amount of coins to be mined. I know that everybody is going to call me names, but "sound money theory" is silly if you don't have the monopoly on money. The fact of emitting only a finite amount of coins, and hence having to *diminish* the block reward, or the sum will not converge, works against liquidity. It promotes hodling, and hence price surges. A good currency needs liquidity, needs to get spent, and doesn't need to "rise to the moon", on the contrary.
The second aspect that was built in, was block size limit. 3 transactions per second world wide can never become a currency. 6 or 12, neither.
So bitcoin was not designed to be an "internet currency", but rather a speculative vehicle, of which the liquidity would be provided by a "banking layer" on top of it, that provides liquid, centralized IOU. ETF, exchange accounts, LN, whatever.
The very fact of organizing a fee market around miners that have to waste huge amounts of value to mine induces these miners to lock in the block size (what we are witnessing right now). There must be sufficient transactions to keep the thing alive, but one doesn't need many small transactions: a few big ones with big fees is much more lucrative, and big transactions are what keeps the price up.
The story of buying your coffee with bitcoin was a good story to kick the thing off, and get it going, but bitcoin could never cope with all the coffees bought everywhere in the world. That was to get "innocent money and idealists" to bitcoin. But they aren't needed any more. Now that bitcoin is speculator's money, the coffee buyers are not interesting any more.
The other thing that bitcoin included, were the "block reward halvings". Instead of being a smooth function, these steps incur always instabilities, perfect for speculators, disaster for money.
In other words, whether by naivety or on purpose, (I think, the former), bitcoin is not designed to be a currency, but has everything for a big money speculator vehicle. Which is what it is becoming. Because it was made that way.
