Great topic and imo, I think the options are getting mixed together. Separating them might help the “what else is there?” question. There are really three categories here, not two:
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Change the issuance — tail emission, taxing old UTXOs. sipa’s point settles this one: a contested hardfork just creates a different coin bootstrapped from Bitcoin’s UTXO set, so “go do it in another currency and compete” is what these really amount to.
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Tweak the on-protocol fee market — statoshi’s dynamic block size, a floor fee. These keep the fee auction going, but as statoshi says, they can’t aim at a specific security level — and they add no new money, they just move the fee side around.
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Pay miners from outside Bitcoin — a reward in some other asset that doesn’t touch consensus and leaves the 21M cap alone. The thread keeps pointing at this without naming it (it’s exactly what “go compete in another currency” describes), but never treats it as its own option. Merged mining is the one accepted example — small, but proof the category isn’t empty.
Here’s why #3 is worth pulling out, and it follows from statoshi’s own point: if Bitcoin can’t measure its own value from the inside, then the only place that price can form is outside it. So an outside, market-set reward is the only kind that even gets at the problem — but it pays for that by giving up consensus enforcement.
What makes #3 worth taking seriously is that it’s the only one of the three that needs no hardfork and no one’s permission — it doesn’t change Bitcoin’s rules or risk a chain split, and unlike fees it doesn’t depend on a particular future showing up. Merged mining already shows the category works; it’s small only because the chains doing it are small, not because the idea is capped — the contribution scales with whatever market decides to fund it. The honest open questions are really about the ceiling: how much durable demand there is for funding security as its own thing (rather than it just flowing back into BTC), and whether a reward miners could in principle ignore actually moves their behaviour in practice. Thoughts?