Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Bitcoin Core and hard forks

From: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2015 11:24:57 -0700

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 11:03 AM, Alex Morcos <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Over the last 6 years there may not have been fee pressure, but certainly
> there was the expectation that it was going to happen.  Look at all the
> work that has been put into fee estimation, why do that work if the
> expectation was there would be no fee pressure?
>

There is a vast difference between what software developers have been
chattering about in the background versus what the users actually
experience in the field.

To the user, talk of a fee market is equivalent to talk about block size -
various opinions are tossed about, but it doesn't really impact them.  Fees
have been low for 6 years.

We see this with the actual data - no fee pressure on average for the
entirety of bitcoin's history.  We see this with the recent stress tests,
which exposed dumb wallet behavior WRT fees.   Users -and software- had the
expectation

Remember, this is not a judgement on whether or not fee market/pressure
should exist.  It is simply a factual observation that users/market have
not experienced this new economic policy.

That opens the question - *why now?*   Why make bitcoin growth more
expensive at this time in its young life?  Many smart people would prefer
that bitcoin continue to grow, rather than making the system more expensive
to use right now.

Choosing "let a fee market develop" -- *today* -- is picking economic
sides, picking winners & losers in the market.

This new policy should be debated and consensus achieved, not simply rolled
out by fiat without user notification.

Otherwise it is engaging in precisely the economic wizardry that this
thread opened with decrying.

Just like block size, there are multiple sides to the fee market debate.
However, Bitcoin Core has (unfortunately) outsized decision making power in
that simply avoiding progress on block size limit will achieve the "let a
fee market develop" economic policy change.  Ironic but true - sitting
around and doing nothing dumps users into a new economic policy.