I am guessing that sooner or later there will be more efficient mining device that will replace those in use right now. This is a must since many are also concerned on the power needed towards the bitcoin mining industry. With less cost yet bitcoin rising into the moon, mining can remain profitable for a long, long time until there is no more to be mined and that's when confirmation fees will be the only available source of revenue.
based on some pencil on envelop maths.
if we stuck with GPU. 55exa would be 30billion graphics cards. ~approx 10mill pc's of 3gpu each. using 600w psu
thats like comparison of 5 billion S9's
however 55exa only uses ~approx 4million s9's = over 1000x efficiency in only 5 years
the hashrate has only halved once in that time. so although btc went from 25 to 12.5 the efficiency of technology has done its job by many folds more...
as for the cost/payment to pools. transaction fee's do not need to have developers mess with transaction count stiffling to push fee's
pools right now dont care about transaction fee's
3000tx@25cent=$750
pools dont like to waste seconds of time collating and choosing transactions to put into blocks for just $750 when the time wastage of doing so risks them not getting a block solved. which not only is losing them the $100k block reward but also the $750, simply because that pool wouldnt win the race.
if pools want income from fee's, shrinking the blocksize does nothing. ASICS themselves dont ''process' transactions. there is no hard drive in an asic to store/validate transactions. an asics job has nothing to do with transactions.
the pools job however is to choose the transactions(collate a block to get a header to then give a piece of data to asics). and right now and for many decades pools dont care about fees. the only reason they add transactions is for 'community care' of making sure bitcoin has a purpose so that people use it so that pools have people to sell their rewards to.
stiffling blocksize decreases users available.
stiffling blocksizes does not affect hashrate or difficulty.
stiffling blocksize hurts user adoption which hurts pools
if pools EVENTUALLY want more income from transactions, pools would prefer:
more users paying less. so theres more happy people in the community.and collectively totals more fee's
pools could also raise the min dust/min relay without needing the blocksize stifling
its like public transport buses. if a bus is empty or full the minimum bus ticket is the same. if a bus company wants more income they would:
add more seats but charge the same per seat = more income
increase the ticket without messing with decreasing seats.
they would never take seats out or incentivise people to use UBER to empty out a bus and then have people go to auction for tickets