You think that miners with not for profit motives are going to be able to maintain a robust, attack resistant network. Others disagree.
Others are
wrong.
I can see this working if people voluntarily pay tx fees. If there are millions of users then they each wouldn't need to pay much to incentivise a strong network of block generators, and indeed, a culture of this sort may emerge. But is is a tragedy of the commons like situation.
No, this is where this error keeps coming up. It's a commons, but not a 'tragedy of the commons'. The collective security of the blockchain is the commons, but the incentives for senders to add a fee are different from the commons resource incentive. The fees are
competing for a time limited resource, inclusion in the next available block; while miners are competing for those fees. Those are not commons.
In another post, you highlighted the fact that there is a transaction acceptance policy encoded in the main client which prioritieses transactions with fees, forcing fees out of merchants needing speedy confirmations, but there is no reason to believe that the mining pools of the future will maintain such a policy when there are fee paying transactions going un-harvested. Luke-Jr, to me, exemplifies the natural dynamic of transaction acceptance policy: accept txs with fees, don't accept txs without fees.
I know you understand this dynamic, however, you haven't made a compelling case as to why bitcoin will work anyway. In any case, I hope you're right. Although, I wish intelligent people on this forum would acknowledge this problem instead of stifling debate.
I have made such a case, it's the 'Wal-Mart' post.
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