> However, any changes require consensus from the miners who create Bitcoins and process transactions, and because it's not in their best incentive to do anything to reduce those transaction fees, no change has received majority consensus.
This is an unfortunate misunderstanding on the part of the miners, and the math is really simple: imagine a network on top of Bitcoin, e.g. lightning.network, which can process 10 million transactions off-chain and settle it on the Bitcoin blockchain using only a single transaction. Imagine if every one of those 10 million off-chain transactions paid just 0.01 cent in fees... this would earn the payment processor $1000, which can only be realized by publishing a Bitcoin transaction, in competition with everyone else making a lot on off-chain fees. The result is that off-chain profits (in the form of fees) would allow off-chain payment processors to pay huge blockchain fees, because they can deduce it from the profit they've made on off-chain fees. Nothing, in my opinion, will increase Bitcoin fees more than layer 2 protocols creating more users and transactions (because fees are paid per off-chain transaction).
The point some miners are missing is that one billion off-chain transactions each paying a 0.01 cent fee is more profitable than 2,000 on-chain transactions paying $1 each. And if everyone is able to earn $100,000 in fees by publishing a single Bitcoin transaction, this must push up Bitcoin fees, since people will be competing on getting into the chain with the bidding power from their earned profits.
This is an unfortunate misunderstanding on the part of the miners, and the math is really simple: imagine a network on top of Bitcoin, e.g. lightning.network, which can process 10 million transactions off-chain and settle it on the Bitcoin blockchain using only a single transaction. Imagine if every one of those 10 million off-chain transactions paid just 0.01 cent in fees... this would earn the payment processor $1000, which can only be realized by publishing a Bitcoin transaction, in competition with everyone else making a lot on off-chain fees. The result is that off-chain profits (in the form of fees) would allow off-chain payment processors to pay huge blockchain fees, because they can deduce it from the profit they've made on off-chain fees. Nothing, in my opinion, will increase Bitcoin fees more than layer 2 protocols creating more users and transactions (because fees are paid per off-chain transaction).
The point some miners are missing is that one billion off-chain transactions each paying a 0.01 cent fee is more profitable than 2,000 on-chain transactions paying $1 each. And if everyone is able to earn $100,000 in fees by publishing a single Bitcoin transaction, this must push up Bitcoin fees, since people will be competing on getting into the chain with the bidding power from their earned profits.