Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] A summary list of all concerns related to not rising the block size

From: Elliot Olds <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 12:52:08 -0700

On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 2:59 AM, Jorge Timón <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> I believe all concerns I've read can be classified in the following groups:
>
> > 1) Potential indirect consequence of rising fees.
>

I'd rephrase this as "Consequences of high fees." It's the level of fees
that is the main issue, not their movement. Moving from 0 satoshi to 1
satoshi fees makes no real difference. Moving from $0 to $1 fees makes a
huge difference. Some consequences are indirect, but others are not (the
first three below are not indirect). Some of the consequences are
uncertain, but others we can have very high confidence in (again: the first
three) and it's only their effect size that can be reasonably disputed.

Here are lots of reasons that you're missing. High fees do the following:

-Reduce the utility of people using the network, even if the higher fees
don't reduce their amount of transactions.
-Make some use cases nonviable, depriving people of Bitcoin's decentralized
benefits.
-Makes level 2 infrastructure like Lightning less valuable by increasing
the minimum value of anchor txns that make sense, and increasing the amount
of pain suffered when your counterparty misbehaves.
-Discourage experimentation with new Bitcoin use cases, making it more
unlikely that such cases are discovered/improved/popular before Bitcoin's
security relies on having many users.
-Makes Bitcoin more vulnerable to regulation by keeping its user base from
growing, meaning regulators face less pressure to keep it unregulated (see:
Uber)
-Reduce the amount of time we have between now and when tx fees need to pay
for a significant portion of Bitcoin's security, by keeping the exchange
rate and thus the value of block rewards low (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_exchange)
-By slowing usage growth, make it less likely that we have a large enough
base of transactions by the time we need to fund network security via tx
fees.