On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Pieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 3:53 PM, Jeff Garzik via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> 2) If block size stays at 1M, the Bitcoin Core developer team should sign a
> collective note stating their desire to transition to a new economic policy,
> that of "healthy fee market" and strongly urge users to examine their fee
> policies, wallet software, transaction volumes and other possible User
> impacting outcomes.

You present this as if the Bitcoin Core development team is in charge
of deciding the network consensus rules, and is responsible for making
changes to it in order to satisfy economic demand. If that is the
case, Bitcoin has failed, in my opinion.

Diverging from the satoshi block size change plan[1] and current economics would seem to require a high level of months-ahead communication to users.


 
all. Yes, old full nodes after a soft fork are not able to fully
validate the rules new miners enforce anymore, but they do still
verify the rules that their operators opted to enforce. Furthermore,
they can't be prevented. For that reason, I've proposed, and am
working hard, on an approach that includes Segregated Witness as a
first step. It shows the ecosystem that something is being done, it
kicks the can down the road, it solves/issues half a dozen other
issues at the same time, and it does not require the degree of
certainty needed for a hardfork.

Segregated Witness does not kick the can, it solves none of the problems #1, #3 - #8 explicitly defined and listed in email #1.

1)  A plan of "SW + no hard fork" is gambling with ECE risk, gambling there will be no Fee Event, because the core block size is still heavily contended -- 100% contended at time out SW rollout.

2) We are only 100% certain that bitcoin works in the blocks-not-full-on-avg state, where there is a healthy buffer between the hard limit and the average block size.

There is remains major ECE risk due to the core block size freeze, possibly pushing the system into a new, untried economic state and causing major market and actor disruption.  Users of the Service can still drift randomly and unpredictably into a Fee Event.

SW mitigates this
- only after several months
- only assuming robust adoption rates by up-layer ecosystem software, and 
- only assuming transaction volume growth is flat or sub-linear

Those conditions must go as planned to fulfill "SW kicked the can" -- a lot of if's.

As stated, SW is orthogonal to the drift-into-uncharted-waters problem outlined in email #1, which a short term bump does address.