Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Incorporating block validation rule modifications into the block chain

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:02:39 -0800

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]> wrote:
> I hope that should it become necessary to do so that correct path will
> be obvious to everyone, otherwise there is a grave risk of undermining
> the justification for the confidence in the immutability of any of the
> rules of the system.

With all I wrote on the gloom side— I thought I should elaborate how I
think that would work, assuming that my gloom isn't convincingly
disproven.

It's the year 2043— the Y2038 problem is behind us and everyone is
beginning to forget how terrible it turned out to be—  By some amazing
chance Bitcoin still exists and is widely used.  Off-chain system like
fidelity bonded banks are vibrant and widely used providing scalable
instant and completely private transactions to millions of people.

Someone posts to the infrequently used IETF Bitcoin working group with
a new draft— It points out that the transaction load is high enough
that even with a 100x increase in block size completion for fees would
hardly be impacted and that— because computers are 2^20 times faster
per unit cost than they were in 2013— and networks had made similar
gains, so even a common wristwatch (the personal computer embedded in
everyone's wrist at birth) could easily keep up with 100 megabyte
blocks.... so the size should be increased as of block 2,047,500.

The only objections are filed by some bearded hippy at the museum of
internet trolling (their authentic reconstruction of Diablo-D3's
desktop exhibit couldn't keep up), and by some dictatorship who again
insists that their communist PeoplesCoin should be used instead— the
usual suspects.  And so, after a couple years of upgrades, it is so.

Or perhaps more likely— it would get revised along side a hardforking
cryptosystem upgrade (e.g. replacing sha256 in the hash trees with
SHA-4-512), thus amortizing out all the migration costs...

The trickiness and risk of changing it— of economic problems, of the
risk of undermining trust in the immutability of the system's rules—
only exists if there is genuine, considered, and honest controversy
about the parameters.  At the moment any increase would be sure to be
controversial: common hardware and networks would not obviously keep
up with our current maximum size, and our current transaction load
doesn't produce a usable fees market.  This cannot remain true
forever.