What was Satoshi's original vision?
1) A digital, decentralised currency
2) That could be sent anywhere in the world
3) For fractions of a penny / as cheap as possible
Satoshi did naively hope that miners would always allow
some free transactions, but I don't think he envisioned that all Bitcoin transactions would be "cheap." He encouraged the use of mandatory fees early on, even when there was room for free transactions:
Another option is to reduce the number of free transactions allowed per block before transaction fees are required. Nodes only take so many KB of free transactions per block before they start requiring at least 0.01 transaction fee.
The threshold should probably be lower than it currently is.
I don't think the threshold should ever be 0. We should always allow at least some free transactions.
Also, take a moment to recognize what minimum fees
used to mean in Satoshi's day: 0.01 BTC vs. the 1 satoshi/byte minimum we generally pay today.
Satoshi also encouraged a fee market, just like we have now:
It ramps up the fee requirement as the block fills up:
<50KB free
50KB 0.01
250KB 0.02
333KB 0.03
375KB 0.04
etc.
It's a typical pricing mechanism. After the first 50KB sells out, the price is raised to 0.01. After 250KB is sold, it goes up to 0.02. At some price, you can pretty much always get in if you're willing to outbid the other customers.
Just including the minimum 0.01 goes a long way.
The narrative of perpetually infinite cheap/free transactions that Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik promoted was never "Satoshi's vision" and I think the above quotes convey that.