No fee doesn't mean free transactions. I paid for those transactions when I bought my stash.
Not really. If I can buy 1 BTC and move it indefinitely as 100mn transactions of 1 satoshi, back and forth, I'll be making millions of bogus transactions for nothing. I haven't bought that "right" to fuck the blockchain and the network, sorry.
I'm also aware that as we go into the future I will be paying more and more fees, because these will start to be the main source of income for miners, instead of the block reward. That's the specification, based on pretty well thought-out game theory to both distribute the monetary base and secure the network in the long run.
I was subsidizing the miners so the network can grow.
The miners will get their 21mn coins, whatever anyone does.
Then you assholes came around and thought Bitcoin could be more useful if fewer people can use it.
The 1MB limit is there for a veeeery long time. Did you came before or after this patch was applied? Surely Satoshi didn't envision "crippling" bitcoin with that patch, as you imply about cripplecoiners etc, but having several vulnerabilities open as a result of the no-limitation was not an option.
When there is a vulnerability and a security patch is issued, you don't just revert the patch if you haven't found an adequate solution to the problem. This is irresponsible.
What you are saying that some assholes came around and thought Bitcoin is more useful if less people use it, is simply not true. What actually happened is that G & H came along and started selling their "bigger is better" propaganda of "XT" and at around the same time some other assholes were doing "stress tests", exploiting all the unused 1MB space, for peanuts, and bloating the blockchain with bullshit. The proposed "solution" was to bypass the patch that was there to prevent the vulnerabilities that had been discovered, despite the fact that the transaction limit was still way below the limit (bogus transactions notwithstanding) under a pretense of false urgency (the question is why?). And they seem to have added some more crap to the XT fork as well that made people repulsed by it.
Anyway that's the story. What we need for the future is a way to scale better. A way that can support hundreds of tx/s without creating bloat and centralization. This can't be achieved with a plain block size increase. The devs know it, the devs of altcoins know it, quite a few people will be working on this for months or years to come. Until then we'll have to manage with a combination of increased fees and an increased blocksize to accommodate for a legitimate increase in transactions.
Parallel to that, the blockchain will continue to scale in terms of value transacted, whether the 1MB limit is raised in the short-term or mid-term. If you have, say, an average 1MB block worth 100.000 USD in transactions, by making better use of it (no dust/spam/bogus/stress txs) you could get 10x of value inside the same block, in terms of money transacted. So, over a year, with the example given (100k USD per block vs 1mn USD per block) you jump to 52bn USD transacted per year instead of 5.2bn. And you do that, with the exact same parameters of 1MB blocks.
This is the alternate dimension of scaling (=in terms of value) which we consider a given since BTC doesn't have any issues in dealing with it. You could be sending 50$ or 1bn with ease. So if you get to have less 0.05$ or 0.5$ txs and more 5$ or 50$, you still process way more money.
You'll be seeing this go higher and higher, irregardless of the block size:
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd