Increased transaction fees result in less Bitcoin transactions, which helped expedite the clearing of the backlog. There is plenty of room to be more concise with transactions, right now something like 50% of blockchain transactions are gambling. They can send these transactions for basically free since blocks are still only partially filled, in the future once it becomes costly theyll take it off chain. Also we can optimize software to use as little data as possible for transactions. And in general instead of sending around dust people will think more carefully about sending Bitcoin. Kind've like how people don't send 25 cents through western union, they only use it for important things.
So your solution to allowing for Bitcoin to support a larger number of transactions per second is for users to send a smaller number of transactions per second?
I really don't think this is s a very solid argument.
The current TPS limit is somewhere between 2-3 with a 1 MB max block size. Unless you have a way to make transactions smaller while still keeping the same level of security, then the only way for the Bitcoin network to process more then 3 TPS over the long run is to increase the maximum block size to be above 1 MB.
Just because the maximum block size is 8 MB (for example), that does not mean that miners will fill their blocks with 8 MB worth of free transactions.
Took that way out of context, I was referring to the massive spam attack which is not how things usually work by any means. The increased tx fees helped clear out the backlog during the attack.
Currently on average less than 0.4 mb is used per block. Once blocks are 1 mb then dust, spam, gambling, faucets, etc. will be gradually forced off chain, over 50% of transactions are of these types so it will give legit transactions ALOT more room. Then once that is existed fees will slowly rise.
Rising fees is crucial to the future of sustainability of Bitcoin, it will be the only earnings miners get for running and securing the network. Without transaction fees Bitcoin would become weak enough to destroy.
Well once gambling/faucets/ect. are moved entirely off chain (I am not 100% sure this will be a good thing), then the average block size will be smaller, however it will still be growing, and it will eventually grow to close to the current 1 MB limit.
Even as the average block size approaches 1 MB, there will be periods of long delays when there are sudden spikes in traffic (similar to how rush hour works in many cities), which will cause confirmation times to sometimes be very long.
Overall transaction fees do need to increase over the long run. If Bitcoin is limited to 2 TPS, then over the long run, transactions on average, will need to include a tx fee of .0208
BTC, which is roughly $5.41 at current exchange rates, and $24.96 at $1,200/btc. The later price is generally going to be more expensive then the likes of Western Union, Money Gram, and Walmart-2-Walmart, while the former would be competitive with W2W, but still very expensive. However if bitcoin is going to truly go mainstream, then it's price will need to dramatically increase (you can't use something to trade hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions per day on something that has a market cap of ~$3.7 billion), and once this were to happen, the necessary transaction fee to keep the network similarly secured as it is today would mean that it would be prohibitively expensive to send bitcoin unless you are sending on behalf of many people at the same time (e.g. many people are using off chain transactions).
It should be beyond obvious that the maximum block size needs to be increased. Over the long run it will need to be increased many thousands of times if Bitcoin is going to potentially replace the VISA (and/or MasterCard and/or AMEX) network(s), although this is a very long way away. For now the best course of action is to increase the max block size to 8MB (or some other amount based on consensus), and then continue to increase it over time as the actual average block size increase, as well as based on currently available technology and pricing (e.g. of network equipment, network services, HDD, and RAM).