Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Hard fork proposal from last week's meeting

From: Tom Zander <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2017 12:30:49 +0200

On Thursday, 30 March 2017 07:23:31 CEST Ryan J Martin via bitcoin-dev 
wrote:
>      The original post and the assorted limit proposals---lead me to
> something I think is worth reiterating: assuming Bitcoin adoption
> continues to grow at similar or accelerating rates, then eventually the
> mempool is going to be filled with thousands of txs at all times whether
> block limits are 1MB or 16MB

This is hopefully true. :)

There is an unbounded amount of demand for block space, and as such it 
doesn’t benefit anyone if the amount of free transactions get out of hand. 
Because freeloaders would definitely be able to completely suffocate Bitcoin.

In the mail posted by OP he makes clear that this is a proposal for a hard 
fork to change the block size *limit*. The actual block size would not be 
changed at the same time, it will continue being set based on market values 
or whatever we decide between now and then.

The block size itself should be set based on the amount of fees being paid 
to miners to make a block.

What we want is a true fee-market where the miner can decide to make a block 
smaller to get people to pay more fees, because if we were to go to 16MB 
blocks in one go, the cost of the miner would go up, but his reward based on 
fees will go down!
A block so big that 100% of the transactions will always be mined in the 
next block will just cause a large section of people to no longer feel the 
need to pay fees.

As such I don’t fear the situation where the block size limit goes up a lot 
in one go, because it is not in anyone’s interest to make the actual block 
size follow.
-- 
Tom Zander
Blog: https://zander.github.io
Vlog: https://vimeo.com/channels/tomscryptochannel