This is a very dissimilar situation, because the game producer has a monopoly on the right to sell the game. If anyone off the street had a right to sell the game, you would see the price fall to almost zero.
This. A topic often overlooked when discussing Bitcoin economics is called "free entry".
Free Entry can be defined as being able to bring a good or service to a marketplace as soon as they establish production of the good or service, impeded only by the costs of the capital.
Decentralization is a function of free entry and low capital requirements. Torrents are highly decentralized, for example, because participants can freely enter the market and the capital requirements are trivial.
Unarguably, there is actually a Natural Monopoly condition that exists in mining, because centralized mining is always economically superior than decentralized mining even when all of the competitors have equivalent overhead per hash/s, as I mentioned earlier.
RaisingRemoving the block size limit causes a race toward maximum transactions, and lowest fees necessary to run the network. In this way, raising capital requirements and damaging decentralization.
Hash-power atrophy, which would occur regardless of the block-size problem (And which is the topic at hand), actually helps with decentralization because it also lowers capital requirements. Is it really a safe assumption that bidding for block-space will "sufficiently" cover hashing costs?
So if the goal is to keep running nodes a trivial endeavor, then maybe this is a problem we don't want to fix? Maybe we want to be running a million USB miners rather than a handful of mining facilities?
Since the block-chain size is already not trivial (By some definitions), perhaps the block size is not too low, it's actually too high.
I don't know. It seems like to really address the problem, there would have to be a clear objective about what Bitcoin wants to achieve and what sacrifices it's willing to make to get there. If the Bitcoin protocol is going to compete with Visa credit cards, then we can simply throw the decentralization idea out the window in favor of Free Entry, and then the developers need to contend with the Natural Monopoly problem.