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

From: Gavin Andresen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2015 11:24:58 -0400

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> So if we would have 8 MB blocks, and there is a sudden influx of users (or
> settlement systems, who serve much more users) who want to pay high fees
> (let's say 20 transactions per second) making the block chain inaccessible
> for low fee transactions, and unreliable for medium fee transactions (for
> any value of low, medium, and high), would you be ok with that?

Yes, that's fine. If the network cannot handle the transaction volume that
people want to pay for, then the marginal transactions are priced out. That
is true today (otherwise ChangeTip would be operating on-blockchain), and
will be true forever.

> If so, why is 8 MB good but 1 MB not? To me, they're a small constant
> factor that does not fundamentally improve the scale of the system.

"better is better" -- I applaud efforts to fundamentally improve the
scalability of the system, but I am an old, cranky, pragmatic engineer who
has seen that successful companies tackle problems that arise and are
willing to deploy not-so-perfect solutions if they help whatever short-term
problem they're facing.

> I dislike the outlook of "being forever locked at the same scale" while
> technology evolves, so my proposal tries to address that part. It
> intentionally does not try to improve a small factor, because I don't think
> it is valuable.

I think consensus is against you on that point.

-- 
--
Gavin Andresen