Fees hitting $55 per transaction killed the goose that laid the golden egg because the miners got too greedy and the greed is far from
over since they are the ones running hubs on the lightning network that charge fees and interest on BTC need
Actually, this is the "fake news" that has been spread. In reality, the miner consortium is the consortium that pushed hard for BCH,with bigger blocks and smaller fees, EXACTLY because they knew it would kill their golden goose and they had a lot of hardware stake in it. And BCH was accused of being "a Chinese miner consortium attack on bitcoin" in a completely bogus narrative that worked.
In reality, the miners tried to save bitcoin, and a totally different group killed the golden goose with a deceptive narrative.
The deceptive narrative was:
1)
the lie that bitcoin needed many full nodes for "decentralization" (even though Satoshi designed bitcoin to RESIST a sybil attack by many nodes, and introduced proof of work exactly for that reason), and that "big blocks" would kill "many full nodes".
2)
that 1 MB was largely enough but that bitcoin was a victim of evil spam by "the miner consortium" (even though, if you look at the evolution of block size on blockchain.info, it was clear that we were hitting the 1 MB limit for real).
3) that in any case, the 1MB limit was a hard limit in the protocol, and that
a hard fork would be the end of the world, too dangerous.
And who was at the origin of that deceptive narrative ? The inventors of the Lightning Network.
The Lightning network can only work, if fees are high and people keep their computers running. If fees on the block chain are low, nobody will go through the hassle of the LN. One has to be convinced that the direct block chain transactions don't work, before one is even going to consider using this second layer. Also, in order for the LN to work well, people need to be trained to "keep their PC running all the time". Otherwise, it doesn't work. So the narrative of the necessity of many full nodes was also a good story here.
Now, miners have high stakes in bitcoin, through their hardware investment. The inventors of the LN, none. Miners like fees, but they like even more a high bitcoin market price, because they are mainly still paid by block reward. The inventors of the LN don't care about bitcoin's market price. They are financed to get their LN working, and it can't work if the block chain transactions work well.
This is why they needed a narrative that will get the block chain congested with high fees and little room.
Satoshi's mistake in 2010 of programming a 1MB limit was leveraged to a holy principle to do this, with 2 bogus reasons: the need of many full nodes, and the fear of a hard fork. And their narrative to put the fault on exactly their detractors worked well.
Lies and deception. Works amazingly well.
