(There is an exchange in this forum, some years ago, where Greg says that the 1 MB limit is as sacred as the 21 M BTC limit, and he would not have put any time into bitcoin if Satoshi's design did not include it. Gavin then points out that the 1 MB was not in the original design, and quotes Satoshi's Oct/2010 post where he explains that the limit could be lifted when needed by a simple 2-line patch and a routine hard-fork release. I did not see Greg's answer. Considering that he has never answered Mike's "crash landing" post either, I assume that he just shut that fact too out of his mind, since it did not fit his convictions...)
This one:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140233.msg1492537#msg1492537Bitcoin is valuable because of scarcity. One of the important scarcities is the limited supply of coins, another is the limited supply of block-space: Limited blockspace creates a market for transaction fees, the fees fund the mining needed to make the chain robust against hostile reorganization
Maxwell is totally clueless about the economics of Bitcoin. It's scary to read that from a guy so influential.
The blocksize limit and the 21 million BTC are two totally different economic beast. It takes a very high degree of cluessnessless to confuse the two.
He states the obvious.
If BTCs were endless why would anyone pay 400$ for them?
Likewise, if blockchain use was infinite in terms of transaction capacity & storage, why would anyone pay fees?
You don't pay for things that are provided in abundance.
If the system is designed in a "go-ahead-use-as-much-space-as-you-want-for-free" the lack of scarcity would lead to few incentives for those using the space to pay the fees.
Theoretically miners would prevent this thing. The game theory would say "but it is not in their interest to process spam, dust, zero-fee txs etc etc". In reality they do. They don't act like rational miners and the irrationality in the mining business where the miner subsidizes (!) blockchain abuse breaks the system of supply/demand in the case of larger and larger blocks.
Haven't you read the paper of Peter R about the existence of a fee market without a blocksize limit?
Miners cannot make infinitively big blocks because of orphan risk. Real world constraints are enough to make appear a need for transaction fee.
If "artificial constraint"<"real world constraint" you are capping the value created by the BTC network because you are lowering the total amount of transactions that occurs on the network (because higher transaction price drive out the demand for transaction) and thus lowering the total amount of fees.
Thinking the economics of the 21mil are the same as the economics of the blocksize is very, very wrong.