I still don't see it how they are going to convince the miners to drop the 1MB limit.
Is there even a single mining pool that would not want to see 1MB limit at work, at least for awhile?
Counting on the pool operators that they will just unconsciously start mining version 3 blocks, just because it's a default setting in bitcoind 0.8.4... One would need to think that these people are either stupid or ignorant, which I don't think they are.
It depends on how big you are. Right now transactions cost about
$12 each in terms of the inflation subsidy, which also shows how the Bitcoin price is being held up by investors, not the utility of Bitcoin as a payment system. If you are a small mining pool you have every reason to keep that 1MB limit... but if you are a large mining pool, why not make huge blocks filled with almost free transactions and force your competition out of business?
Orphaned blocks are interesting too, because if a mining pool is trying to do that what makes sense for your competition is to produce blocks with no transactions in them at all to keep collecting the inflation subsidy. When you do that you don't need to know what transactions are on the network, nor do you need to validate blocks. Of course the people mining at your pool might leave, but only if the largest pool pays miners more in reality - they might not if the business isn't there.
It's a really strange set of incentives.
Incidentally I'm planning on making sure code that makes it easy for miners and mining pools to do exactly this is available, although I hope people use it in a different way: when you know a block has been generated, but haven't validated it fully, attempt to mine a zero-transaction block that would orphan that block. But the way incentives are, mining in the no-validation way is what's most profitable.