If this is a true demand situation based on the recent price movement, then if we have a real bubble move the network is simply going to not be able to handle demand. Increasing fees is not an option because there isn't enough space for everyone regardless of the fees they offer.
What is happening right now shows that P2P nodes can in fact handle larger blocks, they are processing the transaction volume fine and have enough BW to forward transactions. In fact by not clearing transactions in blocks and causing the memory pool to increase beyond what it should, the 1MB limit is probably more stressful on nodes than simply letting larger blocks get processed....
Fantastic! Some incentive to deal with memory exhaustion (which is hardly an unheard of problem in computer-land.)
If I were doing a system from scratch, one would have to do several things (with analogs taken from the real world.)
- pay to get in (e.g., a ticket at the festival gate. Some sort of real infrastructure support as opposed to useless SPV wallet 'support'.)
- pay to get in the queue (e.g., to get a _chance_ to buy your cheese-dog.)
- pay at least enough for the raw materials an labor for your cheese-dog when you get through the queue.
- periodically clense the queue of those who, for whatever reason, not making sufficient progress.
Of course if Bitcoin had been designed like that from the get-go, it would not have gotten to first base. It needed a pretty face to attract the following of Utopians such as fap.doc and the multitude of other mouth-breathers that got the system going.
Now we are at a point where there can safely be free cheese-dogs for all in the form of sidechains. That means that the backing store can safely eject the welfare bums and they won't starve to death. Very humanitarian.
