Well... the blog/article sounds a
little pessimistic for my tastes, but I appreciate the point being made. People just need to keep in mind that it's based on assumptions about demand and that the numbers in that regard are anyone's best guess.
Ultimately, fees depend on the rate of Bitcoin adoption around the world and how often people wish to make use of it. In many places around the world, Bitcoin still hasn't broken free of it's reputation as "
nerd money" at best, or "
money for drug lords and the darkweb" at worst. All the time the wider world populace holds such views, we probably don't have to worry
too much about fees. A few years back I genuinely thought we'd be out of that phase by now, but I guess it takes time for people to wake up and realise the obvious advantages of crypto. I thought the scaling situation was more urgent, but I'm starting to feel like we have a bit of time before the mainstream truly comes beckoning. It's at that point we need to have our shit together and have this scaling stuff sorted out. Plus we've bought ourselves a bit of time now that SegWit is almost set to go.
I'm still of the opinion that we should look at any and all scaling options, be it SegWit, blocksize, Lightning, schnorr sigs, etc and not rule anything out. Plus, I'd still prefer an adaptive blocksize cap over a fixed one because it's inevitable there will be changes in the levels of demand. There needs to be some elasticity there. More research absolutely needs to go into that concept. Having to constantly argue about hardforks due to the blocksize is going to get beyond tedious, so someone find a safe way to make the damn size adjustable, already. I'm also confident that an adjustable blocksize would help de-escalate all this talk of "
3 Bitcoins" where everyone is trying to guess which inane and arbitrary cap
might be the right one. This is science and math, idiots, take the sodding guesswork out of the equation and base the blocksize on something empirical and adjustable!
While we can't rule out the possibility of fees increasing, it's certainly not a foregone conclusion. I think they'll
probably be a bit lower some time after SegWit is rolled out and most users are on the new keypairs. At least for a while, anyway. Keep the scaling ideas coming, though, we might well need them.