Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Long-term mining incentives

From: Owen Gunden <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 May 2015 16:35:05 -0400

On 05/13/2015 09:31 PM, Aaron Voisine wrote:
>  > by people and businesses deciding to not use on-chain settlement.
>
> I completely agree. Increasing fees will cause people voluntary
> economize on blockspace by finding alternatives, i.e. not bitcoin.

This strikes me as a leap. There are alternatives that still use bitcoin 
as the unit of value, such as sidechains, offchain, etc. To say that 
these are "not bitcoin" is misleading.

> A fee however is a known, upfront cost... unpredictable transaction failure in
> most cases will be a far higher, unacceptable cost to the user than the
> actual fee.

Are we sure that raising the block size is the only way to avoid 
"unpredictable transaction failure"? If so, and it's as bad as you say 
it is, aren't we screwed anyway when we inevitably start hitting the cap 
(even if it's raised 10x or 20x)? And if that's the case, then don't we 
do a disservice to users by continuing to pretend that we can make this 
problem go away?

> The higher the costs of using the system, the lower the
> adoption as a store-of-value.

On what do you base this? Gold has a very high cost of using (storage, 
transport) and yet is perhaps the most widely accepted store of value.