Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] A summary list of all concerns related to not rising the block size

From: Jorge Timón <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2015 01:12:08 +0200

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 12:35 AM, Jorge Timón <[email-masked]> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 1:21 PM, Venzen Khaosan <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> 4) General, undefined fear that something bad is going to happen when
>> nodes choke up on a backlog of transactions.
>> - - no specific symptoms are pointed at but presumably there is
>> "pre-traumatic stress" at play.
>> - - Bitcoin-based businesses are going to lose money, customers and
>> potentially fail
>> - - people will flee Bitcoin for another cryptocoin and Bitcoin will be
>> left in the corner, collecting dust and memories of it will fade as
>> SuperCoin with its big blocks becomes all things to all people.
>
> I believe thisbelongs in 2, not really sure if 2.1 or 2.2 since it's
> related to both.

I was tempted to add it as a sub-sub-risk in both, since both things
need to be solved before that stop being a concern. But they may be
more things to do to solve that so I'm listing it as a separate
sub-risk in 2:

2.3) Big list of valid unconfirmed transactions

resulting list:

1) Potential indirect consequence of rising fees.

1.1) Lowest fee transactions (currently free transactions) will become
more unreliable.
1.2) People will migrate to competing systems (PoW altcoins) with lower fees.
1.3) Layer 2 settlements become more expensive
1.4) Less usage than we could have had with a bigger size
1.4.1) More regulation pressure
1.4.2) Not enough fees when subsidy is lower

2) Software problem independent of a concrete block size that needs to
be solved anyway, often specific to Bitcoin Core (ie other
implementations, say libbitcoin may not necessarily share these
problems).

2.1) Bitcoin Core's mempool is unbounded in size and can make the program
crash by using too much memory.

2.2) There's no good way to increase the fee of a transaction that is
taking too long to be mined without the "double spending" transaction
with the higher fee being blocked by most nodes which follow Bitcoin
Core's default policy for conflicting spends replacements (aka "first
seen" replacement policy).

2.3) Big list of valid unconfirmed transactions