but I want to throw a spanner into the works... Let's say the volume of the transactions do not increase? Would people be willing to make a donation to a central pool for miners to continue mining if it comes down to that? I do not think they will ..... Will they pay larger fees than the current
industry standard to get their tx's mined? I guess not..... How will we fund this experiment, if tx volumes decrease and nobody wants to pay extra large fees to feed these hungry miners?
In that case the miners with the most hash power would switch off because it would be unprofitable. There would always be smaller miners willing to carry on mining with cheaper equipment, and at a lower hash rate. The difficulty would drop and the little miners would keep the network going.
in short yes.
we should not be trying to bribe miners with private donations or huge fee's.
capacity increases help users pay less but give miners more over the decades
bitcoins deflationary fiat valuation increases help miners get enough to cover costs.
imagining that miners needed $10k a block.. 25btc at $400 was ample.. (as has been the case these last few years)
at the halving
imagining that miners needed $10k a block.. 12.5btc at $800 is ample...(which we are on course with, without even having to consider fee's)
bribing miners now and paying huge fees now. would make miners care less about bitcoins fiat valuation because they are being subsidized by the bribes and would sell cheaper to still get the $10k. making the bitcoin price drop and the requirement for bribes increase
again for emphasis:
we should not be trying to bribe miners with private donations or huge fee's.
capacity increases and deflationary value increases help everyone