Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] A reason we can all agree on to increase block size

From: Jorge Timón <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2015 12:53:07 +0200

On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 8:53 AM, Jim Phillips via bitcoin-dev
<[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> Yes I've had a couple other people point that out to me as well and the logic is sound. Unfortunately that doesn't help solve the actual issue that mining is currently consolidated within the jurisdiction of a single political body that is not exactly Bitcoin friendly. I don't know how to solve that issue aside from pointing it out and hoping miners outside of China point to different pools and build more farms in smaller countries. Venezuela for example has cheap electricity and could be a good place to mine. Iceland too.

It's interesting how realizing that the blocksize consensus limit does
the opposite of what you initially thought when starting the thread
didn't changed your conclusion from

"If you're truly worried about larger blocks causing centralization,
think about how, by restricting blocksize, you're enabling the
Communist Chinese government to maintain centralized control over 57%
of the Bitcoin hashing power."

to

"If you're truly worried about larger blocks causing centralization,
think about how, by INCREASING blocksize, you're enabling the
Communist Chinese government to POTENTIALLY INCREASE ITS centralized
control over 57% of the Bitcoin hashing power."

The new conclusion is just "somebody should mine from Venezuela and
Iceland" instead.

If you were so concerned about mining centralization, now that you
understand how the blocksize maximum influences it (by being the only
consensus rule that limits it) and if you were consequent, now you
would warn about the dangers of increasing the blocksize consensus
limit in this particular moment in time when mining centralization
looks already really bad (ie 57% hashrate in the same jurisdiction).
Another possibility is that you don't really care about mining
centralization and you were only looking for an argument in favor of
increasing the blocksize, which for some other reason you have already
concluded that must be done as soon as possible.