Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Why Satoshi's temporary anti-spam measure isn't temporary

From: Thomas Zander <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2015 16:03:02 +0200

On Thursday 30. July 2015 14.50.46 Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > I believe the costs and risks of 8MB blocks are minimal, and that the
> > benefits of supporting more transaction FAR outweigh those costs and
> > risks,
> > but it is hard to have a rational conversation about that when even simple
> > questions like 'what is s reasonable cost to run a full node' are met with
> > silence.
> 
> I think the benefit of an 8 MB over a 1 MB in terms of utility is marginal

Like 640kb should be enough for everyone...  Unfortunately the world doesn't 
like things that can be bigger not getting bigger. ;)

> Bitcoin's advantage over other systems does not lie in scalability.
> Well-designed centralized systems can trivially compete with Bitcoin's
> on-chain transactions in terms of cost, speed, reliability, convenience,
> and scale. Its power lies in transparency, lack of need for trust in
> network peers, miners, and those who influence or control the system.

The real advantage of Bitcoin is simpler; its the first system that is not 
owned and possible to subvert that actually works.
All existing attempts before Bitcoin are companies that try to benefit from 
being in the middle, to the exclusion of everyone else and to the exclusion of 
innovation.

> Wanting to increase the scale of the system is in conflict with all of
> those. 

Thats circular arguing.  This didn't actually add anything to the 
conversation.

The insight you skip over is that that Bitcoin's advantage, and the concept of 
distributed computing in general, has is one of ownership and control.

If you want to keep Bitcoin small at 1Mb, do you still reach your goal of 
being free from ownership and control? With our excellent growth trends; 
transactions have to go somewhere, they will not use Bitcoin if we don't have 
space. And that means we loose decentralization, we lose avoidance of 
ownership of the network and we introduce control.

All your rhetoric is missing this basic point; is holding Bitcoin at 1Mb 
advancing it, or hurting that basic goal of avoiding ownership?
-- 
Thomas Zander