[CryptoPunk]

My point is that with a limit of 300,000 or so transactions a day, Bitcoin's average transaction fee would need to be extremely high to match even the current security subsidy, much less one communsurate with a global reserve currency.

I don't see any reasonable case for the prediction that Bitcoin's average transaction fee will reach those extreme highs.

>Hard-forking to remove the block size limit would have profound consequences for the decentralized nature of bitcoin - arguably its most important characteristic.

I didn't say "remove". I said "raise".

[beaner]

> I don't see any reasonable case for the prediction that Bitcoin's average transaction fee will reach those extreme highs.

Why not? At scale with current block sizes Bitcoin would probably be settling payments of institutional-level transfers, state money management, and 2nd-layer networks like Lightning. Individual transaction fees would be high but they would represent aggregated fees for millions of off-blockchain transactions.

The fees wouldn't likely be paid by everyday users at that point.

[CryptoPunk]

Because there is no market demand for it? Why would people pay thousands of dollars to transfer value? Value transfer will get less expensive with the proliferation of e-money, not more. Why would institutional players choose something so expensive?

[beaner]

Because it won't be expensive.

Visa does something like $11 trillion in volume per year. Why does anybody use that if visa takes 1-2%?

1% of 11 trillion is 110 billion. With that amount of fee revenue you'd be able to secure the Bitcoin network 12,000 times over.

So Bitcoin's security is able to grow by 1,000x and still cut prices relative to current popular providers by 12x.

That's cheap, not expensive, and that will lead to demand over time.

[CryptoPunk]

Visa can charge those fees because are no alternatives to Visa. There are alternatives to Bitcoin. It doesn't have a network of hundreds of millions of accepting merchants spread all around the world, and never will, because it can't process a meaningful volume of transactions per second:

In contrast to Visa, which can process 3,000 transactions per second, Bitcoin can only process 3 per second.

Limited, even during peak demand, to 1/1000ths of Visa's average throughput, and 1/10,000ths of Visa's peak usage throughput, there is also no way Bitcoin can match Visa's $11 trillion volume.

[beaner]

Mastercard is a competitor to Visa.

2nd layers for Bitcoin can scale to many thousands of transactions per second.