Ok, to add a dumb question. What if people started to target only tx's with low fees? The big miners usually go for tx's with high fees. If you had ASIC's lying around and you have cheap or free electricity, would it not help if you targeted these blocks with very low fees? Most companies can do this and write some of the electricity that are spend to do this off as a business expense for TAX purposes? If all merchants that are accepting Bitcoin as a payment option just ran a few ASICS to help the network, we would have had a much better network. < also more decentralized >
If there are 200,000 unconfirmed transactions, and ten minutes later a mining pool solves a block and confirms the 3000 transactions that have the highest fee, then there will be 197,000 remaining unconfirmed transactions. If during that 10 minutes another 3500 new unconfirmed transactions are created, then there will be 200,500 unconfirmed transactions.
If there are 200,000 unconfirmed transactions, and ten minutes later a bitcoin accepting merchant solves a block and confirms the 3000 transactions that have the lowest fee, then there will be 197,000 remaining unconfirmed transactions. If during that 10 minutes another 3500 new unconfirmed transactions are created, then there will be 200,500 unconfirmed transactions.
Hmm. It doesn't seem to make a difference, does it. Adding more hashpower doesn't reduce the number of unconfirmed transactions. There are two ways to reduce the number of unconfirmed transactions.
1. Increase the number of transactions that can be confirmed in a block (for example with an overwhelming majority of miners and users accepting either Bitcoin Unlimited or SegWit).
2. Users create less transactions.
Option 2 is what the system is currently working on. As the backlog gets larger, and fees get higher, people get frustrated and abandon bitcoin. Eventually enough people will stop using bitcoin so that more transactions will be confirmed per day than are created. At that point, the backlog will shrink, and transactions will get confirmed faster and cheaper. If it gets too fast and too cheap, then more people will start using Bitcoin and the backog will grow causing higher fees and longer delays. Eventually an equilibrium will be reached where the delays and fees are high enough that the same number of transactions are both created and confirmed each day.
Given the number of people that seems to find bitcoin useful for moving around thousands and millions of dollars worth of bitcoin, it won't surprise me if the equilibrium is somewhere around the point where transaction fees are hundreds of dollars per transaction.
For more details see here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/permanently-keeping-the-1mb-anti-spam-restriction-is-a-great-idea-946236