I asked adam back at hcpp how the block chain would be secured in the long term, once the reward goes away. The base idea has always been that fees would replace the block reward.

At that time fees were approximately 10% of the block reward, but have now reached 45%, with 50% potentially being crossed soon

https://fork.lol/reward/feepct

While this bodes well for the long term security of the coin, I think there is some legitimate concern that the fee per tx is prohibitive for some use cases, at this point in the adoption curve.

Observations of segwit adoption show around 10% at this point

http://segwit.party/charts/

Watching the mempool shows that the congestion is at a peak, though it's quite possible this will come down over the long weekend. I wonder if this is of concern to some.

https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/more/#24h

I thought these data points may be of interest and are mainly FYI. Though if further discussion is deemed appropriate, it would be interesting to hear thoughts.