If this limit increases faster than than the interest in spending money for transactions then it will kill Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has survived for 6 years without the block size limit effectively constraining the block size, why will this established pattern suddenly reverse if the limit is maintained high enough to not constrain the block size (or removed entirely?)
Research IBLTs. They are necessary to do away with the native blocksize throttling associated with completed block transfers and I'll bet that it is most distracting to the guys who wish to bloat the blockchain as much as possible as soon as possible. They'll have to go in with or prior to the bloatchain fork unless the bloat is large enough for a coalition of big miners to augment their operations with proprietary protocol enhancements and take over right then and there. (I'd be interested to know if they sprung from Hearn's mind.
"tanquam ex ungue leonem")
Many people would love to exploit the blockchain for timestamping, messenging, etc, but how much effort is one going to put into a system when even full exploitation limits one's potential. Very high value plain old economic transactions will be very competitive with bit-twitter messages due to value differences. It's completely anticipatable that spam will fill the remainder of a nearly-free-to-use block space if there is a potential that one can build a service on it.
It has to cost quite a lot to do transactions. If it doesn't there will be too little interest in mining, and a 50% attack will be cheap.
That would certainly be the case, if multiplication didn't exist.
Fee revenue is (number of transactions) * (transaction fee)
Because of the magic of multiplication, having high transaction fees
isn't the only way to have high fee revenue.
As a matter of fact, the producers of every product and service in the economy (except a few minor corner cases) maximize their revenue by increasing volume, not price.
The reason they do this is because competition works to drive prices lower over time.
Bitcoin is subject to competition, therefore attempts to maximize fee revenue by restricting supply will fail.
Bullshit. Twice when I was in the Bay Area I lived next to high-end grocery stores. One could easily spend twice the price for an item that one could obtain it for by going down the street to Safeway. That was the very idea and it was the reason people shopped there, and they did a thriving business. The cost of something is highly associated with it's perception of value, and I think I made a very good argument that Bitcoin in anything remotely resembling it's original form will always be a fairly exclusive system. Your simplistic economics appeal to people largely because they are simplistic and by adopting them one can neglect the difficulty of analyzing the real world.