Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Block size following technological growth

From: Bryan Bishop <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2015 09:52:56 -0500

On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 7:15 AM, Mike Hearn via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> He is not saying that. Whatever the reasons for centralization are, it
>> is obvious that increasing the size won't help.
>>
>
> It's not obvious. Quite possibly bigger blocks == more users == more nodes
> and more miners.
>

Well, even in a centralized scheme you can have more users, more nodes and
more miners. Just having more does not mean that the system isn't
centralized, for example we can point to many centralized services such as
PayPal that have trillions of users.

> To repeat: it's not obvious to me at all that everything wrong with
> Bitcoin can be solved by shrinking blocks. I don't think that's going to
> suddenly make everything magically more decentralised.
>

Nobody claimed that moving to smaller blocks would "solve everything wrong
with Bitcoin".

You cannot "destroy Bitcoin through centralization" by adjusting a single
> constant in the source code.
>

Why not? That's exactly the sort of change that would be useful to do so,
in tandem with some forms of campaigning.

> The motivation is profit, and profits are higher when there are more users
> to sell to. This is business 101.
>

I am confused here; is that idea operating under an assumption (or rule)
like "we shouldn't count aggregate transactions as representing multiple
other transactions from other users" or something? I have seen this idea in
a few places, and it would be useful to get a fix on where it's coming
from. Does this belief extend to P2SH and multisig...?

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507