3) Once we hit the 1 mb limit free and nearly no fee transactions will be forced off chain. There is TONS of dust, spam, and gambling that can be done off chain. Over half of all Bitcoin transactions right now are basically dusty junk. This will make plenty of room for legitimate transactions.
4) Once almost all the junk is forced off chain the rise in fees will be very gradual, and it will take a long time for the fees to become an issue for people. In any case the blockchain will function perfectly fine regardless of transaction data volume, fees will simply rise.
If fees ever do get too crazy I'd support a block size limit increase too, but I don't expect that to happen for over a decade if ever.
5) Hard fork of Bitcoin is dangerous and can result in mass confusion, double spends, and loss of Bitcoins. It will damage the value of Bitcoin at least temporarily.
6) We need to maintain a group of scientists which reach a consensus, not just centralize Bitcoin under a couple of developers.
Feel free to add if I missed any.
Thanks for this. I appreciated your summary as I have not seen a good one elsewhere. (If someone can point me to another one I'd appreciate it.)
I don't think increasing fees is a very attractive selling point for bitcoin adoption. The block rewards becoming very small is very far out in the future. As even your chart points out, the blocksize is much more of an immediate issue.
I'm afraid you can't really force your #4, moving people off chain, though I agree there is a lot of dust transactions, not sure why though, it is all satoshi dice, faucets? I fear we are close to having #5 already.
Totally agree on #6.
Thanks again.