TL/DR: A transaction fee market exists without a block size limit assuming miners act rationally.
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Miners being net econo-rational is probably an axiom for Bitcoin to work in the first place.
This is the biggest assumption of various schools of economics. However, economy is always political, economy policy is decided by the ruling class to manage the majority of poor people, so they are modeled towards average households that barely can live without the next pay check. For these people, econo-rational means short term profit seeking
However, the definition of econo-rational is different for different people, depends on their income, their time frame, and their risk tolerance level. If you move those theory to bankers and large capitalists, you will clearly see their behavior do not follow these models. As we know, the miners and pool owners are bankers and capitalists in bitcoin ecosystem, so they won't seek short term profit like average household, their concerns are much larger and longer term.
Yes, I completely agree. Like I said up-thread, with this academic work regarding the transaction fee market, what we're doing is considering different lenses through which to view the problem, so that we can make incremental progress in our understanding. We know that these models are imperfect, but we ask what happens if the assumptions hold, so that we can gain intuition about the more complicated real problem.
More here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1274102.msg13678877#msg13678877
And YarkoL's post was great: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1274102.msg13680077#msg13680077
After so many days of reading exhausted debate from each direction, I'm so tired
I guess in the end people will just simply reach agreement by meetings, a solution that is not too far away from today's model because that is mostly like to reach consensus. Any large change is almost impossible at this stage
As long as block space is unlimited, the fee income will always be a neglectable part of the block reward because they only need to compensate for the orphaning risk, so the miner's need to limit the block size to increase their incentive, but by how much? I think a target of $0.1 per transaction is reasonable, it gives miners enough incentive (higher than orphan risk) while don't hurt average users, so that bitcoin payment is still quite competitive against main stream international payment solutions
And it is also easy for consumers, they know exactly it will cost $0.1 to do a transaction in bitcoin network, it is a constant. Certainty is good