Low fee transactions could take days to confirm. Zero fee xactions may never confirm.
Sounds like it will finally work like it should be.
The blockchain is too valuable a resource to be wasted by zero and ridiculously low fee txs.
And it's not only scaling but usability too. If I have a 100mb block size and it takes me a couple of hours just to sync the last day or a day to sync the last week (before I send a payment), will this be usable? Or will people say, ah yes, now you lost the ability to run bitcoin-qt, just use a thin client...
That's either stupid or dishonest. Nobody is proposing 100 MB blocks and won't unless bandwidth gets much much greater. The design is for block reward to subsidize miners until the network grows big enough to be supported on fees. How is that possible with ~ half million xactions/day?
This is supposed to be a peer to peer network for the people, not <1 million elitists, criminals and middlemen.
We have different interpretations of stupidity.
When I have a system that has a hole in it (bloat in blockchain through low or no fees, that can be abused as an attack vector and kill bitcoin usage and adoption in the long run), I will not go and make it larger so that someone else can sink my boat. *That* is stupidity.
Scaling is not an issue right now. Not the processing of transactions. If you want to make a legitimate transaction, you'll pay a normal fee and you'll be processed in one block.
If you enlarge the block before scaling becomes an issue, then you open the attack vector wide open for further abuse (because it is already abused with over half the transactions being dust and spam). This is beyond idiotic.
I believe when the time comes, and the need is real, the block size can be increased. If it doesn't, there will be just some fee competition that prevents a lot of low and very low value tx. So what? This is certainly the lesser of the two evils involved here.
TL;DR: Keep Bitcoin as a smaller & more uncertain version of fiat. Make sure it also becomes more expensive to transact with.
Put off solving Bitcoin's principal problems for later, because totally good enough for now.
This will really drive adoption.
And downloading terabytes of blockchain bloat will?
Bitcoin is a protocol and while it is true that scaling issues exist, they are being worked on to find solutions. But nobody says we all have to use just one blockchain for storing everything, and doing so with zero cost. This is not feasible. We can transact with Dogecoins for the lulz if we want to. It's still bitcoin-based tech. You can have 100 chains, or 1000 chains. The sky is the limit.
As for cost: In Greece, in order to conduct a bank wire from one bank acc of bank A to another bank account of bank B, it goes like cost 1 euro for sender, cost 3 euro for receiver. Total 4 euros of charge even if I transfer like 10 euros. Do you think this puts people off from transacting with the banks? No. They just don't do it for small amounts, or if they do they are using something like "offchain" transaction by using the same bank for internal transferring of one bank account to the other, which typically has zero cost.