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Bitcoin is not a person-to-person transaction network. Keeping transaction fees down to “keep the network usable” is entirely the wrong idea.

The security of our money stored in Bitcoin comes from one thing only: the cost of an attack. The costlier an attack, the more money we can safely store in Bitcoin.

The cost of an attack is proportional to the profit in mining a block. The more profitable it is to mine, the more cost can be expended on mining by honest miners, and the more costly an attack becomes.

The profit in mining a block comes from: the block subsidy (a bit of BTC that is minted in every block and given to the miner) and the transaction fees.

The subsidy is going away over time - it’s the thing that is halved every 4 years - so ultimately what will secure all our Bitcoin are the transaction fees.

It follows that transaction fees will need to be high for us to be able to store large values in Bitcoin.

It follows in turn that Bitcoin, designed to evolve towards ever higher transaction fees, is not designed for people to buy coffee with.

“But, but…electronic peer-to-peer cash!”

We are not the peers. The peers are settlement operators. We were the peers in a bootstrapping phase, but not anymore, certainly not in the future. This is how BTC scales to holding large values, which is in turn the decentralized service the world needs and doesn’t otherwise have, as opposed to another payment network.

The core solution BTC brings is to the double spend problem. Nobody cares if you double spend a coffee, this solution is for large values. 10 minute confirmations, 7 tps will never make sense for the world’s everyday purchases - it makes sense for settlement. Satoshi understood this no matter what you think he said because the purpose of a system is what it does.

A thousand people buy coffee, their transactions are bundled into one settlement transaction on BTC, and all us coffee buyers share the big BTC fee.

That is how BTC scales. If the idea was to have every coffee purchase on the BTC ledger, we would need far bigger blocks. But then we could not also store large values on BTC (small blocks are needed for verifiability, see block size wars) and the system as a whole needs one such settlement chain to bottom out in. Turn BTC into a big block payment processor, and not only have you reinvented BCH and BSV, but you would still need a SoV chain somewhere, and it could no longer be Bitcoin.

BIP110 proponents seem to accept the small blocks premise, and they want to keep even these small blocks as pristine and small as possible by keeping them free from spam. That sounds “very Bitcoin” but contains a contradiction that leads to the question: why do they want to stop spam?

The “spam” they hate pays for the security of everyone’s BTC via tx fees, it’s objectively good in that way. It makes nodes spend more on hard drives, but it’s the same disc space they’d need if blocks were full of “purely monetary” transactions, which is everyone’s goal.

The goal for everyone who has money in BTC is full blocks with high fees, that’s the long and short of what keeps BTC safe. So why care so much if some of those bits are spam? It’s not really logical.

But for some proponents, the motivation turns out to be “spam makes my person-person transactions too expensive”.

However, that makes the fundamental mistake of not understanding that the small blocks SoV premise implies BTC isn’t really there to transact your coffee purchases, except via bundling.

If your argument for BIP110 is that *you* want to be able to use the network (directly) for (small) monetary transactions, then you just haven’t understood Bitcoin, and how it was designed to scale.

Success for BTC is exactly measured in high fees, so if you are against that you’re against Bitcoin.