Given that the block subsidy is halving every 4 years, it will not be long before the subsidy alone is negligible and certainly not enough to support even a fraction of the current hashrate.
In 20 years time we might be at this point, after the 2044 halving the block subsidy fee will be 0.1 bitcoin, even though the bitcoin price might have increased. But this simply means that we don’t have to wait till bitcoin is mined before miners starts depend only on fees.
Block space needs to be limited to ensure bitcoin's long term survival.
Block space needs to be limited but not in a way that we don't update the limit that was set a decade ago. It's not 2009 anymore. There is a huge difference between demand that we had in 2009 and what we have in 2023. We can't function with 2009's settings. Can someone imagine working today, doing programming/visual stuff with 2009's computer?
I think that flexible block size, i.e. block size increases and decreases according to number of transactions, that means, if there is a 100K transaction, block next block includes 5% of them, then 5% of what's left and so on. At the same time upcoming transactions are added too. If number of transactions decrease, so will the block size, that means that there will still be a competition to get transaction included in the next block and fees won't be as low as 1 sat/vByte. But is this possible to implement in Bitcoin? Ich habe keine Ahnung (I have no idea).
By the way, yesterday, miners were collecting more reward from fees than from blocks alone.
I think we already have a change from the 2009 size although practically the size is still 1MB for one block but the implementation of Segwit in 2017 has theoretically made it seems like an upgrade to 4MB per block for all segwit transactions.
Imagine a 100k of transactions is been included in a single block, then this will greatly affect the decentralization of bitcoin, numerous number of transactions that’s can be batched to one separately because the fee is low and this will mean a bigger block size which in turn results into high cost of individuals running a node as the cost to store data will be expensive and also will push out pools with smaller power (hashrate) out of the network and then the network will be centralized to only the big mining nodes which some of them have started censoring transactions already.
Also even if the block size are increased wouldn’t the shittokns like ORDI and STATs continue to spam the network? Decentralization is the major concern whenever the issue of block size increment is discussed, there is no way it wouldn’t be affected.