I don't necessarily disagree with you that there will be people that want more than 21m coins.
An argument like that will never be presented "we want more coins and high inflation for the lolz".
It will be presented as "we want cheap txs".... Arguments like
"People want cheap txs, who are you to stop that".... Populist bullshit like "bigger blocks" and the "dangers" of "fullblockalypse".
There is no comparison between a hard fork to raise the blocksize and a hard fork to increase the 21 milion cap on supply. The former is a minor property that almost everyone agrees will need to be changed at some point. I owned Bitcoins for years before I even know there was a max blocksize. I knew of the 21 MM limit before I bought my first coin.
A slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slopeIt was a known fact that as we go forward subsidy reduction will be compensated by increased tx fee revenue for the miners. We are nearing the second halving and we are at around 3/4ths of the monetary base already being distributed - leaving just 1/4 left. So where exactly is the increased fee revenue?
Miner compensation was supposed to roughly equal out because after the halving, $/BTC price was supposed to double or greater. Fees as a percentage of total miner compensation is something that should gradually happen over time. It's not something that can be forced. If it won't happen naturally, it won't happen at all. People have alternatives.
What are the fees? 1-2-3 cents? Are we serious? And you are blaming "cripplecore" etc etc, like if it was 2mb then something would change (fees would actually be lower because first block inclusion would be assured even at 10 satoshi per byte).
Right now the fee is the risk of transacting on an experimental network still in alpha. When the network has been tested and has become a reliable business tool used by millions, then fees will be more explicit.
And forkers went out and said "ohhh we can't have a fee market, we must go to 8MB and 20MB urgently because the rising fees are unacceptable, they will kill bitcoin adoption" etc etc. They pretended all txs <1MB are all legit and that the lack of more space is preventing ...scaling real btc txs, instead of simply crowding out the spam.
It's not anyone's place to say how big a transaction has to be to be legitimate. If we have real economic freedom, we get to decide that for ourselves. You don't want nonmonetary uses of the blockchain, but it is precisely colored coin type property title transfers that are likely to pay high fees relative to their BTC value. In fact without them, it's hard to imagine who besides middlemen performing settlements would pay.
If you make a precedent in favoring near-zero cost txs through hard forks, because you somehow have an ideological opposition to one of bitcoin's first principles (that as we go forward fees per block will rise) then you can make it again by increasing inflation instead of fees. You used to say that you don't want to pay fees because you bought your right to transact when you bought your coins and now you are saying "ohhh with lightning there will be less fees for the miners etc etc". It seems you spin it any way you like just to stir stuff.
that's all wrong. Let's say we are talking about water instead of blockspace. We have a small community with a creek running through it and water is basically free. I think the water market will grow in the future because our settlement is growing and future industrial uses of water will make it scarce enough to become a commodity. You think the community isn't growing fast enough for that to ever happen naturally so you pass a law forbidding anyone from washing their car or watering their lawn. You have it backwards. Who's going to move to a community where you can't water your lawn?
People might move to Los Angels with water rationing but that is because there are enough economic and social opportunities to compensate. Few will move to bumblefuck nowhere and be willing to suffer the same restriction. Los Angels would have never become Los Angels if they have those sorts of water restrictions when it was a pueblo. Too many other towns didn't.
I actually own some property where this exact scenario is taking place. The local water district holds a monopoly on water supply. The town was designed for five thousand people, but it is a failed development with only about three hundred year round residents. My water fees are higher than my property taxes and I don't even have a tap! They argue that they need to charge me anyway because the water district needs money for operations and with fewer residents, they need higher fees. The population has not grown in the five years I've owned the land.
We need a critical mass of users before a fee market becomes a necessity. Bitcoin's first principles is that the blockreward subsidizes mining until that happens. You can't make it happen. If you try to force it, you'll just scare off the new users and prevent the very thing you are trying to create.
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