Fantastic article. I don’t wish to detract from the general nature of your essay because it covers so much and is very well written. But, I have a specific question about one aspect.
I am interested in more of your thoughts regarding the POW security scalability issue. It seems to me that this is an even bigger problem than you outline.
As you outlined, the halvings are reducing miner income exponentially, so, for the security budget to remain the same, Bitcoin’s price has to increase exponentially. IE. Bitcoin price needs to double with each halving for the security budget to remain constant. I totally agree with that. However, this only keeps the security spend at the same level whereas the prize for attacking Bitcoin is increasing (exponentially). As the prize increases, Bitcoin’s defences need to proportionally increase not remain the same.
In other words, Bitcoin’s security is not scaling with its market cap.
To my mind this seems a much bigger problem than the market seems to recognise.
I made a post about this but nobody has specifically commented about this point: Is Bitcoin's fixed supply incompatible with proof-of-work?