It's almost the reverse... high BTC/USD ratios mean high real transaction fees and long confirmations, even for small purchases. The fork made it better, but I

It's almost the reverse... high BTC/USD ratios mean high real transaction fees and long confirmations, even for small purchases. The fork made it better, but I don't think this is a solved problem for BTC. Litecoin evangelists will point out that the usability of litecoin is currently far and away better. Part of that is certainly attributable to design, but part of it is attributable to LTC/USD being a better ratio than BTC/USD, meaning a 0.001 tx fee is a few pennies in one and a few dollars in the other. The popularity of a coin increases adoption (and so network effects), but increases hurdles to usability at the same time, it's a really fascinating game theory situation... We might end up with a suite of coins that users bounce between, or maybe some clever altcoin designer will find a clever fix for some of these issues. Not sure.