This isn't "selling fear", this is common sense. This isn't about sending transactions without a fee, this is saying your transaction may not make it in even with a fee. Get the premise right before you decide you're disagreeing with it. Full means full. As in wait for the next one. And if that one is full, wait for the one after that. How long do you think people will wait before complaining that Bitcoin is slow and useless? Bearing in mind this is the internet and people complain about the slightest little inconvenience like it's the end of the world. I don't want to see the outcome of that fallout.
OK, lets get the premise right. If we ever get to a scarcity market for transactions, it might look a little more like this:
1) Your client would inform you of the amount of fee you should include if you want your transaction confirmed in an average of X-minutes, where you can set X. If you want it faster, or guaranteed delivery, you pay more. It becomes an auction market with a new auction every 10 minutes. Full means full *at that price*.
2) Service Providers and high volume transaction businesses will increasingly do a lot of off-chain ledger-ing (maybe with side chains) and less frequent settlement transactions on the block chain.
3) Back door off-chain payment deals (maybe in fiat) will be made by some high value transaction makers to get preferential treatment by their favorite miner (who is to say that this isn't already happening?)
4) People will save transactions for off-peak times, and combine transactions to economize.
5) Others won't care and will just pay 'whatever'
6) Lots of folks on the internet will complain.
Bitcoin would probably grow a little slower, but please realize that this is an endurance race even though sometimes it feels like a sprint. Bitcoin can never lose by growing too slowly, only by growing fatal flaws. It is worth it to be careful.
It's a nice theory, but without the aid of a crystal ball or time travel, I don't know how your client is supposed to be able to tell you how full the next block is going to be. I suppose it could give you an amount based on the average fee paid in the previous block, but I don't know if that would accurately forecast the amount you'd need to pay to guarantee making it in. Just to be clear, though, (before any anti-forkers jump on this as a sign of my conceeding) even with a system like this in place, 1MB would still be insufficient for any considerable increase in adoption. Also bear in mind that if it gets too expensive, people will just use something else. There's a very delicate balancing act to maintain if we go down that route.
By the time you get down to points 4, 5 and 6, I'm afraid that's where it falls apart completely. Why would someone save transactions for an off-peak time when there will be others systems they can use right away? If it reaches that point, people won't just complain, they'll leave and use another coin. This leads us back to the whole "elitist chain" argument. If it doesn't work for the masses, the masses won't use it.
Yes! You are a great interlocutor to see the depths of this.
Without the aid of crystal balls and time travel we don't know how much the transaction should cost, AND we don't know the appropriate block size we need at a given block height also.
We agree then, that we don't know the future. The things to come will make us both wrong many times over, if we pretend otherwise.
I can't know that SPV client developers may chose to implement some statistical analysis of fees and offer the user best guesstimates based on the fees in the transactions of the current block... Who knows? Maybe instead there could be data providers that manage this prediction market well. Maybe these data providers compete to make it so the clients are very light weight, and they deliver the information to a mobile app through an easy API? There are bound to be people with better ideas...
What I do know... and I think you would agree... is that Whatever the consensus (consensuses?), there will be some adjustment. Markets will respond, life goes on. Furthermore, if the outcome of "no fork" is as tragic as some people imagine, this lack of consensus will
build the consensus FOR the fork, yes? (This would be as much a positive story in the media as a negative one... So many people are
using Bitcoin now! It is growing up! Much always depends on who writes the article, for whom, and how.)
We also agree that some people may use something other than Bitcoin, or else Bitcoin will change to accommodate in another way to the degree that is possible (unless and until the fork is made).
My preference is for
more science and measurement, and it is possible that I am entirely wrong, which would be great. Days when I am shown to be wrong are good days. It means I have learned something important.
I like this quote.