My thoughts:
- AM compete in a fixed reward market. ...
I hold a few AM but I don't think the price is going to the moon.
Miners are competing for about 4 million fixed BTC reward within the next 3-4 years. However, people usually forget to include the fees in that picture.
With increasing market adoption, the fees will make up a significant portion of the mining reward. And increasing the block size limit proportionally to the market adoption should only result in lowering the average fee per transaction, not the total reward from fees per block. It's hard to estimate what the equilibrium for the transaction fee reward will be. Right now we have a transaction volume of about 400,000k BTC per day which is about 2700 BTC per block on average. If you take a conservative estimate of 1% transaction fee you arrive at 27 BTC fee per block.
Thus the future mining income is likely to be considerably higher than 4 million BTC within the next 3-4 years and reward from fees will eventually outperform the fixed BTC reward. But it's hard to project the timeline of that development. Transaction fees is a market which is currently neglected by mining companies, but it will become more and more important as bitcoin matures.
Yes, I haven't forgotten about the fees, but to keep my post to a reasonable length I haven't considered them. Until they become significant it's probably closer to correct to ignore them rather than try to price them.