The reason we have to worry about miners producing "too large" blocks is because they don't pay for all the P2P network resources they use (neither do end users).
All the arguments we have about resource consumption are derived from that primary design flaw.
If we fix it, then we won't have to argue any more.
Well put.
Till we have had a 1:1 ratio between full node and miner, the block reward
did pay for all the resoures involed in the process. Once such ratio started
to decrease, due to the introduction of mining pools, mining and full node
role became more and more decoupled.
The block reward remains on the miner side, though.
* edited to read more clearly.
I agree with the notion that miners are for the most part unaffected by block size and are empowered not to care, this is also why I dismiss those developer arguments that want to solve the block size problem by manipulating mining fees, or some variant of this idea. The incentive is not in the TX fee to reduce block size - that's paying miners not nodes if anything you want the incentive to be supply and demand based on node size.
Ironically it is only the competition for the fee between miners that will force writing blocks to the marginal cost and force the block size to the smallest size capable of sustaining a profit, this could be neatly modeled by the Nash equilibrium.
As block rewards diminishes the Nash equilibrium is introduced and miners become marginalized with little to no power in the system.
I participated in discussing the idea in 2012 of financially incentivizing notes in a market driven way to regulate miners and block size. But after pondering the idea over time it seemed it was not necessary.
People invested in the idea that money is memory who store that memory on the blockchain - They have a lot of "memory",ie. an invested interest in the blockchain will want to preserve the blockchain, some call it altruistic but I prefer to think they will use greed for the grater good.
The conclusion I draw is as long as wealth is distributed and people are in competition with one another the blockchain will remain distributed. by the nature of the design of Bitcoin, the wealth that is still to move in to Bitcoin cannot be transferred into Bitcoin with out redistributing it to the participants who grow the network.