At the very least, as compensation from mining decreases, a minimum network transaction fee should be imposed and it should increase proportionally to difficulty to ensure that all miners receive a predictable and steady flow of bitcoins for the resources they provide.
Each miner is free to decide on their own minimum acceptable fee and reject those transactions that don't meet the minimum. No enforcement of a uniform minimum is necessary.
first of all its been a long long time since "miners" were solo, these days they are in pools and treated as workers.. so these workers do not decide the transactions that get into a block.. the pool does. instead the workers just hash out a small piece of data (header) handed to them from the pool, to get a valid hash/nonce that fits the rules of a block solution. so try to use the word pool next time when talking about the mechanics of transaction selection
The fact that the miners are paid less while you need more is what make them sell their bitcoins at an higher price and thus lead to a price rise.
That's not how it works. Sellers (including miners) are free to ask for higher prices, but if buyers won't pay those prices (typically because others ask for less), then prices don't rise.
ok some numbers for you, each day 3600 coins are created, and at the time of posting. here is some numbers of coins the top 3 pools made in a day
1000btc F2Pool (40 blocks)
1000btc AntPool (40 blocks)
675btc BTCC Pool (27 blocks)
i will concentrate on antpool for the details,
you may think that this 1k coins is small volume per day.
but remember.. they day trade. so when they sell the coins thats 1k volume, when they buy a few hours later, thats 2k volume(still 1k hoard), when they sell a few hours later thats 3k volume(still 1k hoard)
so 1k coins can be 3k volume on an exchange just by day trading one cycle and then back to sell again.
then you add in their play money they decided to keep(profits) from previous days, which also adds to their day trade capabilities
so say it is a mere 5% of days income(50btc).. over a year thats 18250btc
so now because of the last 365days fun.. they have 20k+(day trade profits add a little extra) of coins to play with on any one day.. so day trading just 3 trades a day can be as much as 60k+ coin volume a day.
1. at this point you can ask yourself if they kept 10% a day for 1 year(40k coin hoard / 120k sell-buy-sell trade volume), it would easily explain why the chinese exchange volumes are soo soo high on day trade volume compared to the west
2. at this point you can ask yourself if they done 4, 5, 6 trades a day that can be 120k, 160k, 200k volume a dayhopefully by now you can see that the pools have a huge sway and power of the markets.
but if you think that pools such as antpool (majority owners of their solves) have no weight when it comes to playing the markets, then its time you re-evaluate the real life scenario of the bitcoin economy.
we are no longer in the solo mining era where all coins are split between thousands of people.. the main pools like antpool and btcc have ALOT of reserves purely because they themselves own the majority of rigs and manage the pools, etc.
think about it.. take an imaginary 20,000-40,000 btc.. and see (theoretically) by looking at the exchanges what kind of price movements you could cause with that amount, if you were motivated to move the price