The result is that Bitcoin still does the same txs per kb as before. There is no actual improvement in scaling, more like a tradeoff where decentralization and network vulnerability to bloat attacks are tuned to "worse" so that more low-to-zero fee txs can go through.
Such would move the hard cap of somewhere around half a million transactions a day to a higher number. If you do not feel that the ability to process more transactions per unit time is an element of scalability, fine. I find such a position absurd, but so be it. If you insist on clinging to such a definition, than I am more interested increasing potential transactions per unit time than in
your definition of scalability -- at least at this point in time, when we are rapidly approaching that limit.
And despite your repetitive statements stripping the reality, this has nothing to do with whether the transactions are zero- low- or ouch!-fee.
Half a million a day regardless of the fees paid. Period.
It has
everything to do with low or zero fees.
If, say, you go from 0.5mn txs per day to 1mn txs per day and a spammer can add 0.5mn txs per day for peanuts to fill the extra capacity where does that leave you?
You'll go back to square 1 and you'll still be crying "ahhh the blocks are full, we need a new increase, my negligible fee doesn't get me confirmed in 5-10-20 confirmations and I need to pay more and more", etc etc.
But not only will you be crying for the same things, you'll now have to deal with double the bloat, more hardware requirements, higher expenses for running nodes, a more centralized network, etc etc.
Yes. A 'spammer' with sufficient resources can clog the system, no matter how high the maxblocksize is. So what?
That is not the relevant point.
There are two kinds of spammers:
a) A spammer with not so many resources can bloat it and clog it (whether 1mb, 2mb, 4mb etc) for peanuts if the room is plenty (thus not requiring much fees to get paid), if the fee structure is not properly designed and if the miners are processing zero to near-zero fee txs (many miners do - so eventually your spam gets included).
b) A spammer with sufficient resources, can bloat it and clog it -despite an anti-spam fee structure- as long as he is willing to pay the price. The problem with this attacker is that he would be very visible. People would know it's big governments or banks doing it. So banks or governments paying to create bogus txs would be an admission of fear and a vote of confidence for BTC (despite the disruptive effect of spamming it).
The relevant point is that, at the current maxblocksize, the system supports only a half-million transactions per day (+/-). Period. No more may be processed, even if every such attempted transaction was accompanied by 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, or more BTC. This is a hard limit currently, and this is an absolute fact. I don't know why you keep trying to deflect the conversation to the less-important 'amount of fees issue'.
I consider the number of txs irrelevant compared to
actual use.
Right now you could have, let's say hypothetically, a 0.5mn tx capacity maxed out and of them only 0.25mn could be legit and 0.25 are spam. It won't change anything if blocksizes goes to 1mn tx capacity maxed out and the ratio goes like 0.35mn legit / 0.65mn being spam. It's just cheaper spam.
In and of itself, the half-million per day limit would be no issue, but only as long as no more than a half-million 'valid' transactions are attempted per day. However, we are currently trending towards saturation. On average, blocks are currently approximately half-full. And in the last year, actual block size has increased 136%. On current trend, we don't have a year to raise this limit before user frustration. We don't have a half-year. If we get a surge in adoption this month (not an unlikely prospect, given the widely-media-discussed doubling in price over the last quarter), we could easily saturate within weeks of today.
When new interested parties arrive, money in hand, but are thwarted by not being able to acquire Bitcoin due to there being no room in any block for their transaction, what do you think the result will be?
If new interested parties arrive with thousands or millions of dollars and they are arguing whether they should pay a few cents in fees, I'd tell them to ...fork off and find an altcoin that promises free or very low fee txs, until that one is crowded or abused and then they discover the hard way that there is no free launch in crypto.
Any system, altcoin etc that allows cheap use (and by extension => cheap abuse) can and probably will be abused once it becomes larger. The temptation is too high for malicious attackers. In the mid-90's I knew a guy that used to mailbomb local ISPs so that their bandwidth was depleted. The local ISPs had like 64Kbps-128KBPS leased lines that they had to "spread" to 50-100 users online, connected with 14.4 to 28.8k modems. Users didn't have enough bandwidth to begin with and when the mailbombing packages started to arrive, everything went to a crawl. He was doing that for ...the lulz. The idea that he was somehow important to disrupt network service for many people just by doing something as simple as ...sending mails that were saturating the internet link of the provider was apparently exciting to him. It's my belief that if a currency is vulnerable to that kind of attacks by kids => it's not good.
To return to the issue at hand, being in BTC allows one to participate in a decentralized system where the government won't just come in and tell you you can't transact due to "capital controls", or that your balance is confiscated. Your balance won't become zero because the bank made some poor choices and you paid for it. You also get a type of money with very specific inflation parameters, unlike fiat. Now all these require of you a small technical knowhow and paying some small fee for your txs because the network -at this point in time- won't scale to VISA-like or paypal-like numbers. If one doesn't like the benefits of decentralized payment systems, decentralized "banking" and decentralized currencies due to the small fees, let them go back to fiat currencies, the big banks, western union, credit cards etc. They'll love the inflation, the fees there, the ability of the government to control your life etc etc.
If you don't get the advantages of crypto => you can bail.
If you do get them => you don't mind paying a small tx fee. It's the least you can do to support the system.
If you do get them but you also don't want to pay even the small tx fee => use an altcoin until that too is abused and requires higher fees.
