My current half-assed theory of history is that it will take a bunch of boom / bust cycles before MoE is even remotely possible, mostly for the reasons you said: if price keeps generally creeping up on shortish timescales, it's just a vehicle for speculation, and people are incentivized against using it as money, even aside from any tax or regulatory frictions.

Eventually someone will yell "hey nobody is actually using this for anything" and make a convincing case about how it makes no sense to have a store of value that you can't, like, exchange -- a value grounded only in fiat -- and for whatever reason conditions will be just right for that message to take hold and to unwind the narrative. The price will collapse, and we'll be in a winter for a while, a longer one this time, perhaps exacerbated by the utter lack of a fee market and eviscerated mining incentives given price dump + block reward evaporation.

Ironically, the price hemorrhaging will disperse btc more broadly than it had been dispersed thus far. The restrictions vs most kinds of building will be lifted because hardly anybody will care anymore. People might actually start to use btc at something like scale. Maybe nostr will take off. Then the whole thing will start over.

I still don’t understand private equity