Bitcoin was meant to be electronic cash. Not digital gold. Not a speculative shrine. Not an expensive settlement toy for institutions moving millions while ordinary users are politely shown the door.

The economic design was simple: miners would process enormous numbers of transactions, each paying a very small fee. No individual payment needed to be expensive because the system earned revenue through volume. A fraction of a penny multiplied across millions or billions of transactions becomes a substantial security budget.

That is how functioning payment networks scale. They do not make each customer pay more because capacity has been deliberately restricted. They lower the marginal cost, expand throughput and earn more by serving more people.

The block subsidy was never meant to finance mining forever. It declines. Transaction fees were supposed to replace it, not through a tiny number of extortionately priced transactions, but through vast numbers of inexpensive ones.

That distinction is everything.

A network processing seven transactions per second must eventually charge a great deal per transaction if fees are expected to support its miners. A network processing millions or billions can charge almost nothing per transaction and still generate enormous aggregate revenue.

Bitcoin was meant to make small, casual payments practical without a trusted intermediary. It was meant to compete with payment systems by being cheaper, faster and more open—not by becoming a digital vault whose entrance fee exceeds the value of what many people wish to send.

The original vision was low-cost cash for everyone. BTC replaced that with artificial scarcity, high fees and the curious doctrine that a payment system becomes more successful as fewer people can afford to use it.

That is not scaling.

It is exclusion wearing a monetary costume.