The fact is that transactions still consistently and reliably get mined quickly with reasonable fees of 40-50 satoshis/byte [0] [1], or roughly $0.04-$0.05 for

The fact is that transactions still consistently and reliably get mined quickly with reasonable fees of 40-50 satoshis/byte [0] [1], or roughly $0.04-$0.05 for an average 250 bytes tx. For a global payment network that provides non-reversible payments and near-instant (within a block) settlement, this is a dirt cheap. The only real issue we're experiencing is due to broken wallets that don't handle fees well. Fortunately, most modern wallets today do handle fees properly, and users are slowly moving away from unmaintained wallet software that don't (the main culprit being blockchain.info's wallet). The median time for fee paying transactions to get confirmed has been 12 minutes at peak [2] (note that 10 minutes is the average time between blocks, and so the absolute minimum possible average time for the first confirmation), which shows us that the majority of transactions are being conducted using proper wallet software which does not cause delays. In reality, actual bitcoin-using customers that are detached from all the drama in the online bitcoin community don't actually experience any degraded service or delays (again, except for these using broken wallets), and would be very surprised to learn about all the drama going on. > Development should under no circumstances be centralized with one entity, but there you have it. Bitcoin Core is not really an "entity". It is a diverse set of technical experts working on improving Bitcoin using a consensus-driven decision making process. There are hundreds of contributors from various backgrounds, associations, and geographical locations. Communication and discussions are all being done in the open, in mailing lists, GitHub and IRC. There is no hierarchy and no one is in charge, and community members have repeatedly shown their dedication to the consensus-driven approach and opposition to merging controversial changes. This development process has made Bitcoin very resilient to hasty decisions driven by populism, political forces and tyranny of the majority situations. > those who want it to simply be a digital gold / store of value Straw man? I'm not sure who you're referring to exactly. There are people who want bitcoin to scale using on-chain capacity, and others that want bitcoin to scale using a multi-layered system with the blockchain as the settlement layer and payment channels acting as a write cache. I'm not aware of any group of people that don't want it to scale at all. If anything, I would say that these advocating for a multi-layered system are more true to the original vision of bitcoin as an "electronic cash system". Using a write cache would allow for really instant (safe zero-conf), really micro (down to tiny fractions of a cent), really low-fees (approaching zero) and really high-volume (orders of magnitude more than what's possible using blockchain alone) payments -- basically, what bitcoin has always been sold as, but never actually was. [0] https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ [1] https://bitcoinfees.github.io/ https://bitcoinfees.github.io/ [2] https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespan=60days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespa...