Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Long-term mining incentives

From: Aaron Voisine <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 May 2015 18:31:56 -0700

> 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 <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Aaron Voisine <[email-masked]> 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
>
>