There are a few possible objections to your legitimate (and probably informed) opinion that the fees are artificially high, apart from L2 - which I, differently from you, believe will solve or ease the issues.
A valid position and one I have held in the past (and had quite the discussion with Stolfi about at the time). However, it becomes ever more clear that Bitcoin is the way it is because it solves the problems that Bitcoin is designed to solve. Any second layer solution is not Bitcoin and will thus not solve the same problems. Hence the ever increasing complexity of LN and the ever extending time required. To be clear, I am not against LN and think it can be very useful in the problem domains it was originally envisioned to solve. However, it has had its scope increased as a way to put off increasing the blocksize which has done a disservice to not only those who had bold visions for Bitcoin but also the LN project itself.
- The actual block size has been made larger by the SegWit update. The bookkeeping has also changed to provide incentives towards certain types of transactions over others, and the new incentive system has deflected much public (uninformed) attention from the fact that there is more space in blocks today, not less.
The last block (at current time) was 1.16M with a rolling average looking more like 1.3. Disregarding the other arguments against segwit (and the fact that segwit transactions are, in fact,
larger than legacy transactions, given that people are stuffing transactions into blocks as hard as they can right now with simple transaction fees in the 20-30 dollar range, that's paltry. Especially given it was clear we were soon to hit the block size limit regularly end 2015/beginning 2016.
- If the fees are artificially high now, why wouldn't they remain inflated after, say, a doubling of the size? The more the mining power gets centralized, the more room for abuse there is. A small size, at the very least, allows user nodes to check by themselves that there's no fuckery going on. Verify without trust.
Maybe. Less so. A simple doubling would have best been done in 2016 with a roadmap to other options down the line. LN should never have been something that everything was depending on. It wasn't fair to Bitcoin and it wasn't fair to the LN project.
When Satoshi added the block size limit, blocks were 1/100 of the size of that limit. That's huge headroom. The *natural* fee for a block would be the resource cost for validating and storing a transaction and the resources for hashing a block (which *does not* depend on block size) plus a small amount of profit multiplied over a number of miners. We're talking around 200 bytes. That's
trivial and the block reward is still in play and arguably more valuable than ever. Meanwhile, improvements in technology have made this process ever cheaper. Fees should be marginal, Certainly nowhere near the 20-30 dollars currently required. This indicates an imbalance in incentives. This is why I say fees are artificially high. They are not what would be being set in a truly competitive free market.
With that said, it seems that a contentious fork has not provided an answer (for a variety of reasons) so I am curious to see how things play out.
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