On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 06:21:50PM +0200, Jorge Timón wrote: > On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:52 PM, Gavin Andresen wrote: > > I would very much like to find some concrete course of action that we can > > come to consensus on. Some compromise so we can tell entrepreneurs "THIS is > > how much transaction volume the main Bitcoin blockchain will be able to > > support over the next eleven years." > > Mhmm, I hadn't thought about this. This makes sense and actually > explains the urgency on taking a decision better than anything else > I've heard. I've spent a lot of time talking to companies about this, and the problem is telling them that isn't actually very useful; knowing the supply side of the equation isn't all that useful if you don't know the demand side. Problem is we don't really have a good handle on what Bitcoin will be used for in the future, or even for that matter, what it's actually being used for right now. As we saw with Satoshidice before and quite possibly will see with smart contracts (escrows, futures, etc) it's easy for a relatively small number of use cases to drive a significant amount of transaction volume. Yet, as Wladimir and others point out, the fundemental underlying architecture of the blockchain has inherently poor O(n^2) scaling, so there's always some level of demand where it breaks, and/or incentivizes actors in the space to push up against "safety stops" like soft blocksize limits and get them removed. Note how the response previously to bumping up against soft policy limits was highly public calls(1) at the first hint of touble: "Mike Hearn: Soft block size limit reached, action required by YOU" 1) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149668.0 -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 000000000000000002761482983864328320badf24d137101fab9a5861a59d30