21 TB of data per year is more than manageable. Not by some yet to be developed future tech, but by today's equipment that has a price tag. With 2k$ HIVE that hardware becomes affordable even for backup witnesses.
As for the claim that consensus nodes are able to handle sustained max block traffic, it can be made because state does not really grow with bigger blocks. The things that grow (assuming the same mix of operation types as in mainnet) are number of comments and account related data, but these are subject to optimizations (points 7 and 8), at which point the growth really happens on disk rather than RAM. In reality we should rather expect increase in use of custom jsons, because blogging won't suddenly attract many new users, but third party apps might. Custom jsons leave no mark in state of consensus nodes. Block log growing too big? Split block log and pruning is getting final touches, but is already merged into develop. The only problem with such large block log will be replay, but many people already use a workaround by downloading prepared snapshots rather than performing full replay.
There is a lot of room between current level and max possible traffic, a lot of room between current price and 2k$. It won't suddenly jump between the two leaving us surprised. Also unlike Bitcoin, where changes are hard, Hive has no trouble in adapting. Price increase would be beneficial, because we could afford to finance development from DHF, which is not the case today.
This is all great to hear and everything but I'd like to refer back to the title of the post:
Token Price Doesn't Affect Fee Price
The demand to use the chain and the token price of the chain are two different things.
If we are offering free free free no matter what the market throws at us we are going to drown.
Free things get exploited. This is a known and indisputable fact.
You're assuming token price has to go up if demand to use the chain goes up.
It doesn't.
The demand to use the chain will go up because we are offering free service.
And people can leverage that free service into money in their own pocket.
That's not sustainable for us.
You are coming at this from a technical aspect, which is great.
But there is also an economic and business aspect that you're completely ignoring.
Honestly I do think it will work out fine in the end it just won't be pretty and many curveballs will be thrown.
But Hive does not offer free service. You can buy into the chain (vest) and gain the right to use it roughly in proportion to your share. Compared to other chains, in particular those that charge direct fees, we have the following:
But you are right. It is possible that Hive will get 100-200 new whales representing some applications, those whales will flood the chain with their custom operations, RC costs will increase to the point where normal people can't afford to operate, which will drive them out. Token price would increase, but not to the point where node operators could suddenly afford much higher class equipment.
I don't believe in above scenario for one reason - if the application only needed the chain and not the community, it would be more reasonable to just set new chain with Hive code. Such apps could still be connected to Hive, operating on its own chain (can still be decentralized) for the most part, but broadcasting to Hive transactions that are needed for future replays. In fact recent developments (under the disguise of "lite accounts") seem to point in that direction.