BTC Believers, what is your rebuttal that BTC isn’t scalable to the masses due to miner fees? I was debating with a friend yesterday and he explained that if mass BTC adoption would occur, miners would simultaneously increase fees significantly. Btc users in third world and developing countries wouldn’t be able to afford the fees, and if a miner does accept their transaction, they would need to wait weeks as the miners would prioritize higher fee transactions in the first world. Thoughts?

I’m not a bitcoin maximalist, but I think they would say scaling solutions like the Lightning Network are meant to solve that problem. Miners can’t really “increase fees” unless they formed a cartel where everyone agreed to not process transactions below a certain rate. Otherwise they would simply be giving up the fees for those lower rate transactions for the blocks they mine which would be taken by any miners willing to fill in their blocks with those transactions. Otherwise, fees are essentially an auction and users decide how much to pay based on how quickly they want their transactions processed. Certainly mass adoption would increase this at least in the short term. If you assume Lightning Network or similar off-chain scaling solutions will work and also gain mass adoption, that would take even more power away from miners to set rates since the blockchain would then become more of a settlement layer, with the majority of user transactions happening off chain.

Who said that BTC is going to be the currency of online transactions? I think the daily transaction player still remains to be adopted. BTC is a store of value that you will draw from. Today no one pays with cash and most people use credit. Those transactions are payed ~30 days later while charging people fees that in some cases are egregious.

Btw, bitcoin miners are heavily (and I mean heavily) concentrated in China

Doesn't really matter because at the end of the day Metcalf's law and the fact that it had first mover advantage. Also purely from ubiquity, there are many more countries that also accept BTC as a payment method, ATMs, restaurants, etc. There's no marketing budget on this planet that could get to the point of saturation where a shitcoin could come within distance of BTC regardless of how close the market cap of said shit coin is.

Overused analogy but bitcoin is like Gold. It will go up in value and prob makes more sense to trade parts of it to an alt coin for easier faster use. But it’s still gold.