Combined with the low transaction rate I would assume people don't care about Bitcoin as currency -- only as a rapidly appreciating asset. As long as the price keeps skyrocketing why would you ever spend any unless you had no other currency?
Not really. I have a bitcoin debit card. This essentially puts the money in my wallet into bitcoin. The way bitcoin has been doing over the past year, all it does is make everything reduce in price relative to the time I put the money in the wallet.
How can we count votes of people who don't have the money for a single transaction fee? I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be better because it was the cheapest?
You subsidize them then. Mining isn't free. Running a node isn't free. Bitcoin was never about being cheap, it's about protecting your purchasing power.