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'I don't think any of my transactions are illegal.'
If you are in a jurisdiction where you can acquire sats and then later spend/dispose of those sats without incurring a tax liability for any gain in the value of those sats relative to fiat then you are very fortunate.
The vast majority of people living in 'liberal western democracies' do incur such a CGT liability whenever they acquire than later spend/dispose of sats...because tax departments have defined Bitcoin as a commodity and therefore imputed CGT liability on any such transactions. This is a very sly obstruction of the legal use of Bitcoin for MoE.
The extraordinary amount of recording required to comply with such a requirement if you are to use Bitcoin as a daily or even less frequent MoE is effectively going to make it impractical for most people.
Therefore most of us who do insist on using Bitcoin as a MoE in 'liberal western democracies' do so illegally...we do not record, compute and pay the CGs on every coffee purchase (or zap on SNs!) because to do so is absurd, but it is also the law in almost all jurisdictions.
We are defined, technically, as criminals, by the fiat cartel of government and bankers on every MoE transaction...even if we are not prosecuted.
Most citizens will quite understandably not wish to take such a risk...and thus Bitcoin MoE is successfully obstructed.
The other estimated 70% of humanity who live under autocracies, are mostly quite explicitly banned from using Bitcoin as a MoE. Some of them too defy the law, but again the suppression of MoE use is more or less effective upon the majority of citizens.
El Salvador is the only nation I know of where MoE use of Bitcoin does not incur a CGT obligation...there may be other jurisdictions cantons or provinces, but they are surely few.
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Germany and Portugal are two examples in Europe where this is not the case and IIRC Czech Republic too (but there you'd have to wait 3 years after acquisition, which is a long time, vs a year in the other two.) So in these places it's doable if you're able to do some financial planning - this affects 100M people. And success in these countries will definitely influence others to do similar things.
I agree that the classic liberal economies in Europe, especially the UK and the Netherlands, are terrible when it comes to financial freedom right now. But that is not static.
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That is good to know - it gives the opportunity and freedom for consumers and merchants in Germany, Portugal and Czech Republic to actually use Bitcoin as a MoE.
I hope that freedom remains, and spreads and that people in other jurisdictions demand for that freedom too...and that can perhaps happen if we acknowledge and raise the issue and awareness of it!
[Option 1]<-- this, but note: MoE adoption is currently behind price movement, this observation is correct. Nothing ensures that price movement and adoption should grow symmetrically, but a potential design flaw in the halving schedule is that it expects it. This is an open question for us to find out. Together with cryptographic weaknesses, this is the risk you take when you adopt Bitcoin into your financial world: we don't know what will happen. Any answer to this is speculative so we can only treat it as a hypothesis and use that to inform ourselves on what steps we shall take to shape Bitcoin into what we want to see.