It's not a binary option. Raising the limit at a moderate pace, so that fees don't have to increase a substantial amount with increasing adoption, is a middle ground solution, that will lead to average fees remaining affordable but not-zero.
There are quite a few constants in Bitcoin that one could argue with, that is what we do. It is however important to do it for the right reason.
Avoid paying fees is not a right reason.
Again, a straw man argument. No one has argued that the limit should be raised to "avoid paying fees". I want the blocks to come against the limit but I want that limit to be much higher than it is. I want the limit to put some upward pressure on fees, but not too much, because I don't want mass adoption to be dependent on end users paying "excessive fees" to access the blockchain.
Exending on above:
It is rather difficult to substantiate an algorithm that would set course for the future, given the huge amount of unkown parameters a constant we have is preferred by occam's razor.
But anyone wanting a permanent 1 MB restriction also needs to substantiate this course being set for the future. The argument for getting rid of the 1 MB restriction is no more speculative than the one for making it permanent.
Given what Peter R has shown:
In response to those claiming that a hard fork to increase the blocksize limit will hurt the miners' ability to collect fee revenue:
The empirical data we have so far does
not support the notion that the miners will be starved of fees or that blocks will be full of low fee transactions if the blocksize limit is increased. If we inspect the fees paid to miners per day in US dollars over the lifetime of the network (avg blocksize << max blocksize), we see that total fee revenue, on average, has grown with increases in the daily transaction volume.
The total daily fees,
F, have actually grown as the number of transactions,
N, raised to the power of 2.7. Although I don't expect this
F~
N2.7 relationship to hold forever, those suggesting that the total fees would actually
decrease with increasing
N have little data to support this claim (although, during our present bear market we've seen a reduction in the daily fees paid to miners despite an increase in
N.)
Past behaviour is no guarantee of future behaviour, but historically blocks don't get filled with low-fee transactions and historically the total fees paid to miners increases with increased transaction volume.
And given that there is no reason to assume that the demand for space relative to available space will be lower with a higher block size limit, there is no reason not to raise the limit above the current 1 MB in light of DeathAndTaxes' analysis on what this limit will mean for end-user access to the blockchain.
