> by people and businesses deciding to not use on-chain settlement.

I completely agree. Increasing fees will cause people voluntary economize on blockspace by finding alternatives, i.e. not bitcoin. A fee however is a known, upfront cost... unpredictable transaction failure in most cases will be a far higher, unacceptable cost to the user than the actual fee. The higher the costs of using the system, the lower the adoption as a store-of-value. The lower the adoption as store-of-value, the lower the price, and the lower the value of bitcoin to the world.

> That only measures miner adoption, which is the least relevant.

I concede the point. Perhaps a flag date based on previous observation of network upgrade rates with a conservative additional margin in addition to supermajority of mining power.

Aaron Voisine

co-founder and CEO
breadwallet.com

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 6:19 PM, Pieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Aaron Voisine <voisine@gmail.com> wrote:

Conservative is a relative term. Dropping transactions in a way that is unpredictable to the sender sounds incredibly drastic to me. I'm suggesting increasing the blocksize, drastic as it is, is the more conservative choice.

Transactions are already being dropped, in a more indirect way: by people and businesses deciding to not use on-chain settlement. That is very sad, but it's completely inevitable that there is space for some use cases and not for others (at whatever block size). It's only a "things don't fit anymore" when you see on-chain transactions as the only means for doing payments, and that is already not the case. Increasing the block size allows for more utility on-chain, but it does not fundamentally add more use cases - only more growth space for people already invested in being able to do things on-chain while externalizing the costs to others.
 

I would recommend that the fork take effect when some specific large supermajority of the pervious 1000 blocks indicate they have upgraded, as a safer alternative to a simple flag date, but I'm sure I wouldn't have to point out that option to people here.

That only measures miner adoption, which is the least relevant. The question is whether people using full nodes will upgrade. If they do, then miners are forced to upgrade too, or become irrelevant. If they don't, the upgrade is risky with or without miner adoption.

--

Pieter