This is my fundamental disagreement with Gavin's proposal. It not only makes no attempt to figure it out, it takes away the impetus to do so for 20 years, when we have had Bitcoin for only a third of that time. This is what makes it such a jaw-droppingly misguided proposal unworthy of someone in his position.
Instead we are expected to undertake new risks without even the promise of the improvements needed to resolve the issue in either a long term manner (using a measured rate based on block-size need) or a permanent manner (removal of the limit based on it no longer being necessary).
Catching up after a week's absence.
So fully agree with this sentiment. The change locks bitcoin onto an automatic 20 year ramp to essentially zero limit. None of us know for sure how this will play out.
The only reason I can think Gavin would want to do this is maybe a fear that after the next jump in price and usage, bitcoin might start to become too large to effectively fork/change, and so it is best to make a change today that locks in future changes to remove the limit as a minimum bitcoin needs.
Gavin's view seems to be that the market will figure it out. I agree it will, but believe it will figure itself out by becoming more centralized with a majority of nodes running in cloud datacenters (I already only run my full node in AWS). So I don't worry that bitcoin will technically break, but worry that the immediate solutions the market finds will make bitcoin less decentralized and easier for centralized governments to attack through regulation. I'd prefer bitcoin stay smaller if that is what it needs to do to remain more decentralized.
If Gavin is worried about not being able to fork after the next potential burst why not apply Justus idea [1], too much coding with not enough time?
[1]https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/2015/02/09/economic-fallacies-and-the-block-size-limit-part-2-price-discovery/