The problem will solve itself. The reward over time is only as low as many miners take part in the mining game. Lower the reward and many miners will switch off their unprofitable miners. Which means the remaining rewards will be split through the remaining miners, which means they will earn more.
I don't particularly disagree with the said. In fact, I already mentioned something to that tune somewhere in the thread earlier. There are two major issues with this, though. First, this problem is apparently the flaw in design (an
arbitrarily set number), at least, the way it is set up to work (if anyone begs to differ, think about how non-optimal (or, better, disruptive) the halving is/will be). Second, the disrupture in Bitcoin operation may be fatal to it, meaning it may never fully recover from
this halving...
I don't see why this halving should be different. I mean even when 50 or 70% of all miners are switched off then, it doesn't matter at all since the remaining miners will earn more because they don't need to share. I think because of that no problem can arise.
I don't know how the matters stand at the moment, but in August there was a transactional glut, i.e. there were a few thousand unconfirmed transactions that didn't get confirmed in time (up to 50,000, if I'm not mistaken). I got caught too, my ~1 BTC transaction hadn't been confirmed for 2 days. I guess it was a deliberate effort by miners to stimulate the price, since I saw a lot of new blocks with only the miner's TX in them...
Therefore, it is hard to predict what the miners can be up to
That was because the stresstests. Someone created piles of junktransactions with a sligthly higher fee than legit transactions so that miners included the more expensive transactions and normal transactions got stuck. The problem was not that too view miners exist but that each block only can hold transactions worth 1mb of data.
By the way... the last days we have full blocks without spam attack. Many transactions are not confirming for a long time even though they have a good enough fee. Only because some people think we should not raise the blocksize limit.
The empty blocks are normal. Some miners do that all the time. The idea behind is that a block with only one transaction can be propagated faster through the network. Reaching >50% faster and maybe orphan other blocks that are big and can be propagated slower.
But there is a network to spread big blocks in 2 seconds or so. Every miner using it will not need empty blocks anymore. It is no argument anymore that you need to use empty blocks for an advantage.