So, I think there is a huge misconception of so called 'greedy' miners. The issue of higher fees isn't really the miners fault. It is the rules of the protocol that is. For example:
In the protocol (disregarding the security aspect for a moment) It doesn't matter if there is 1 miner mining or 1 billion miners mining. The maximum number of transactions allowed in a block is exactly the same and the amount of time for that block to be mined will also be the same.
I think maybe a solution to high fees would be to make a rule that would require a First In First Out system with a guaranteed minimum fee. Now this wouldn't decrease transactions or transaction time, but would remove user incentives to offer higher fees because they would have to wait their turn to be confirmed, creating a more level playing ground. This would also give businesses some reassurance that they will get paid once the transaction has been broadcasted in a somewhat predictable matter of time.
Just a thought.
What do you mean by "first in first out"?
Transaction relay times do not matter because nodes receive different transactions at different times.
That's why the blockchain is needed and why blocks are timestamped.
So yes, transactions are received at different times by different nodes, but that is not how transactions are entered into the mined block. What happens is when a block is mined, the transaction que is setup where the miner's software can accept the transaction into the block accepting the fee offered. It makes sense that the top fee amounts get included into the block first. This creates a competition which pushes fees higher. If instead we assigned an order to the transaction when it was accepted by a node
based on first in first out and guarantee that the transaction(with a minimum transaction fee) then (if valid) the transaction will eventually be added to the block chain, then this would have the effect of elimination of competition for the next block which would reduce transaction fees to the minimum. (There would be no reason to increase your fee because you que in line is based upon when the node broadcasts your transaction.) This might also have the limited added effect of incentivizing running your own full node. Because then the faster you can broadcast a transaction the faster it would get to be mined...Once part of the FIFO que the business then can determine how long before the transaction will be added. Also businesses could do segwit themselves on the transaction to determine validity to decide whether to risk giving the product and waiting for the confirmation or just waiting a predictable amount of time for the confirmation to come in before dispensing.