Exactly. Problem is i guess most here are not understanding or dismiss principal economics, and forget the one and only rule: the free market - if it is indeed free - always wins in the long run, and no politically driven central controlled engineering can go against the collective wisdom and need of the users. That is supposed to be the whole point of bitcoin.
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I do not understand how "smallblockers" or elitist (read Hayek's Fatal Conceit) forget this simple fact:
the utility hence the value of the network is solely based on the judgement of the USER - who might have no clue about the technical part, bandwidth, storage space - but the system is for them. It can not exist for the will of developers/miners. Without millions of users, whom voluntary agree to hold, move, invest economic value in the network, mining and development is meaningless. If core can not find a solution for the needs, someone else will, for there is economic reward for it!
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Without ever increasing adoption, and new utility, like colored coins for example, the price will stop growing, and mining becomes ever increasingly useless - because the coinbase reward diminishes, fees can not go up - no new users who would compete for blockspace -, and network value diminishes**.
You use the banks, paypal, credit cards etc, don't you?
As a user you want ZERO fees.
They don't give it to you. They charge you. Some times a lot.
Are these organizations dying from not meeting user demands? Did their network effect got negatively affected and thus never became widespread? If no, why?
The reason is because there was no alternative. So, your economic idealism about market demands by users etc etc hits the wall of economic realities.
Bitcoin is the first thing that comes close to challenging them on multiple fronts. Yet, it too, has some limitations due to technology. These may not be true in 5-10-20 years, but right now they are. So... with this as a given, you can still position bitcoin in the market segment where it is way more profitable to transact with it than the banks, paypal, credit cards etc.
For example paypal says if you receive money, I take 0.35$ and something between 1.5 and 3.5% in fees - or something to that effect. So if I lose 4$ in a 100$ payment, of course it would be better for me to choose BTC for that 100$ payment and keep like 3.5$.
The prices, fees and disadvantages of my competitors (reversible txs, having my own money or "freezing them") etc etc are what ensure that I go upwards in the free market that you mention because I'm better than them.
I do the transaction faster, cheaper and in a non-reversible manner (after 1conf). It's not whether I allow spam/dust txs or not. If your fees are like <0.5$,
then you are already beating most banks, credit cards and online payment systems - which automatically means that you have the competitive advantage and you'll increase your marketshare. As you do that, you increase your tx capacity to accommodate, but not giving away space for free to abuse because that acts in a self-defeating way for the functionality of the network. P2P networks are inefficient. Hierarchical databases / centralized databases are orders of magnitude more efficient. So when you try to scale P2P networks the inefficiency kind of multiplies and you need to be careful, in the technical sense.
As for waste, spam, elitism etc, just read the quotes of satoshi in my post above. Was he an elitist or a realist - in terms of how the network operates?