In that case it didn't remedy the problem of constantly full blocks, but got a ton of people on board the bitcoin train in the meanwhile. And with them more interest, investments, research and ideas.

In the case we increase the limit and no government or banking group immediately uses up all the space in blocks, it of course would prevent constantly full blocks for the time being. Bitcoin keeps working reliably, is fast and cheap -- more users on board the bitcoin train. And as long as we do not immediately increase it to 1.6GB (something no one is suggesting), we could still maintain a good level of decentralization, maybe even increase it together with an increase in users.

Eventually we'll have to deal with the fading subsidy, but there's no reason to deal with it at this point in time. What we need today is more users and artifically limiting the blocksize doesn't help with that. At the very least we should try to incorporate technological growth into bitcoin. Keep the 2010 1MB limit, but account for "inflation". If you're arguing that noone can predict the future development of bandwidth, cpu and storage I'd say it doesn't matter if we are too optimistic, because when we start seeing that a future doubling of the limit will cause major issues, it will be easy to find consensus and change the rule accordingly.


2015-08-14 4:26 GMT+02:00 Venzen Khaosan via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>:
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Geir,

In the scenario below, you argue that the current 1MB limit would lead
to "constantly full" blocks. If the limit is increased to say 1.6GB
then a government or banking group may choose to utilize 1.5GB of the
capacity of each block (and pay fees or not) for their settlement
network. Then how did upping the blocksize remedy anything? Or is this
use-case not plausible?

I would like to ask you, or anyone on the list: when we say that
mining secures the network, what does that mean?



On 08/14/2015 05:01 AM, Geir Harald Hansen via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> 3) A few more people begin using bitcoin. Bitcoin buckles and
> dies.
>
> - Something happens a few months from now causing an influx of new
> users and more transactions. - Blocks are constantly full. - A
> backlog of transactions keeps growing indefinitely. - At first
> people say "bitcoin is slow". After a while they say "bitcoin
> doesn't work". - Changing the hard limit on block size requires a
> fork and takes too long. - As bitcoin no longer works people stop
> using it. - Bitcoin lives out the last of its days in the
> backwaters of the internet with only 5 users. They keep telling
> people "we increased the block size now". Unfortunately noone is
> listening anymore. - People laugh at you and say "I told you that
> buttcoin thing was doomed to fail. After all it wasn't real
> money."
>
> If the hard limit had been increased earlier then mining pools
> would have been able to react quickly by upping their own soft
> limit. But this was not the case and so ended Bitcoin.
>
> So in summary:
>
> By increasing the block size limit you run the risk of: - The
> transaction fee market takes a little longer to develop. By not
> increasing the limit you run the risk of: - Bitcoin dies. The end.
>
> Transaction fees should not be the main topic of this discussion,
> and probably not even a part of it at all. That seems outright
> irresponsible to me.
>
> Regards, Geir H. Hansen, Bitminter mining pool
>
> On 12.08.2015 11:59, Jorge Timón via bitcoin-dev wrote:
>> I believe all concerns I've read can be classified in the
>> following groups:
>>
>>> 1) Potential indirect consequence of rising fees.
>>
>> - Lowest fee transactions (currently free transactions) will
>> become more unreliable. - People will migrate to competing
>> systems (PoW altcoins) with lower fees.
>>
>>> 2) Software problem independent of a concrete block size that
>>> needs to be solved anyway, often specific to Bitcoin Core (ie
>>> other implementations, say libbitcoin may not necessarily share
>>> these problems).
>>
>> - Bitcoin Core's mempool is unbounded in size and can make the
>> program crash by using too much memory. - There's no good way to
>> increase the fee of a transaction that is taking too long to be
>> mined without the "double spending" transaction with the higher
>> fee being blocked by most nodes which follow Bitcoin Core's
>> default policy for conflicting spends replacements (aka "first
>> seen" replacement policy).
>>
>> I have started with the 3 concerns that I read more often, but
>> please suggest more concerns for these categories and suggest
>> other categories if you think there's more.
>> _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev
>> mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>
>
> _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing
> list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>
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