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

From: Aaron Voisine <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 May 2015 18:08:16 -0700

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 1:35 PM, Owen Gunden <[email-masked]> wrote:

>
> This strikes me as a leap. There are alternatives that still use bitcoin
> as the unit of value, such as sidechains, offchain, etc. To say that
> these are "not bitcoin" is misleading.
>

The only options available today and in the near future that I'm aware of
are of the centralized custody variety, which is pretty bad in my opinion,
but your point is taken.

>
> Are we sure that raising the block size is the only way to avoid
> "unpredictable transaction failure"? If so, and it's as bad as you say
> it is, aren't we screwed anyway when we inevitably start hitting the cap
> (even if it's raised 10x or 20x)? And if that's the case, then don't we
> do a disservice to users by continuing to pretend that we can make this
> problem go away?
>

When we start bumping up against the block size limit, the transactions at
the margins will experience failure in a way that will be unpredictable to
current wallet software. We can slow blockchain growth by increasing fees
alone, without introducing the additional cost of unpredictability around
confirmation failure, which when it comes down to it is just another
(extreme) way to keep usage low. Instead of fees and unpredictable
confirmation, why not just have fees alone. A single, upfront, known cost.

>
>
> On what do you base this? Gold has a very high cost of using (storage,
> transport) and yet is perhaps the most widely accepted store of value.
>

I would argue that the reason gold is not the one world global currency
that it once was is because of those costs. That's why people shifted over
time to gold backed bank notes and eventually fiat.