That's the thing. If you increase the fee, more miners will end leveling it out. If you decrease it (and if mining becomes unprofitable), some will leave and level it out again.
Yes; there will always be miners. The problem is that if too many drop out, the network becomes more vulnerable to 51% attacks.
Well, for mining to continue at current profit levels, the halving of the block reward has to be balanced by increase in total transaction fees.
no
halving of the supply output of coins SHOULD be balanced by a demand rise causing a price rise. this in turn causes miners to profit as their coins are worth more. there is no need to subsidise/tax mining pools until 2140
When you say SHOULD, do you mean as a prediction of economic theory, or do you mean morally, or is it merely what you hope will happen? Because I think the 25 BTC per block is too small a fraction of all the coins minted to make much difference to the supply curve, so won't in itself affect the price.
The price may go up anyway, but as I wrote in #23, I wouldn't want to rely on that for the security of the network.
