And what happens after all the "spam" transactions are delayed and adoption has grown to a point where there still isn't enough room in a 1MB block for more "normal priority" fee paying transactions? That's right, the normal priority transactions will start to be delayed as well. What do you propose then? Or do you honestly believe roughly 10 minutes worth of transactions from all over the globe will continue to fit neatly into something smaller than a floppy disk for the rest of forever?
People will probably send smarter transactions if the fee gets too high. E.g. joining more transactions in sendmany, using internal transactions at exchanges where both have a wallet, etc. Bitcoin will not go under, and Bitcoin transaction fees have lots of room for expansion before we reach credit card or bank transfer level. Eventually we will have to use sidechains, Lightning or similar for smaller transactions where the fee will be too high for economic use of an in-chain transaction. And we will get faster transactions as well. But there is lots of room for growth before we need that, as this malicious spam campaign has proved.
You think the average person will put up with all that needless extra crap?
What needless extra crap? I didn't mention any needless extra crap.
I highly doubt it. People like simple and they like fair. The only reason to limit the network to 1MB is to pander to elitist ideals. People sending large amounts get security, everyone else gets risk and is forced off-chain to rely on a third party.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. People who don't mind weaker security, already use SPV wallets instead of running a full node. Lightning will provide at least as good security as an SPV wallet, with faster confirmation.
The wealthy minority get all the benefit and everyone else gets a second tier service. People getting involved in crypto aren't doing so just to rely on a different third party to handle their transactions for them. The whole idea is that the transaction is recorded on a blockchain without placing trust in someone else. If Bitcoin can't accommodate those transactions, the majority will simply use a different cryptocurrency. Users won't support a network that doesn't support them.
Yes, using some scamcoin could be a solution for those with very special needs. I expect most people to use sidechains instead, where you don't place trust in anyone else. Don't forget the fact that over the past year or so 94% of the full nodes have left the network. The quickly increasing resource requirements is an important reason. I have switched off two of three of my own wery well connected full nodes for that reason myself. The security and privacy of a full node is already a privilege of the comparatively wealthy. You want to make it even more so. I disagree with that approach for the many of the same reasons that you want to increase the resource requirements for privacy and security even more.
If Bitcoin becomes nothing more than a tool for the wealthy, I don't see how they're going to keep miners on board. Billions of people sending several transactions a day on a network that does scale will easily generate more in fees than a few one-percenter-wanabees sending the occasional large payment. As Bitcoin's block reward diminishes over time, those fees will need to increase if you don't want to start haemorrhaging hash rate. The question is, do you make individual users pay a higher amount? Or do you allow the number of transactions to increase and collect a greater quantity of fees.
You don't get it, do you? Increasing fees means increasing miner rewards at no cost to the miners. Larger blocks incurs a cost, which is why many miners don't fill the blocks even today.
If, hypothetically, there was no block reward right now, based on the transaction volume we are getting now, how much fee would need to be paid on each transaction to give at least the current average level of fees plus the 25 BTC reward?
What an incredibly useless exercise. When I started the block reward was 50 BTC. There was a neglible drop in hashrate when the reward halved. There is no reason to keep the reward at 25 BTC. The cost of that to everyone who want the security and privacy of running a full node is too high.
Seems counter intuitive. 'Those with the ability have the responsibility to take action' type of situation, and in this care the decision is pretty clear. Why would I have Eligius mine this scammer's spam transaction when instead it can mine the transaction of someone who actually just used bitcoin to purchase something, or bought or sold bitcoin, or whatever other legitimate use case is actually happening as we speak?
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