On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Pieter Wuille wrote: > On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 3:53 PM, Jeff Garzik via bitcoin-dev > wrote: > > 2) If block size stays at 1M, the Bitcoin Core developer team should > sign a > > collective note stating their desire to transition to a new economic > policy, > > that of "healthy fee market" and strongly urge users to examine their fee > > policies, wallet software, transaction volumes and other possible User > > impacting outcomes. > > You present this as if the Bitcoin Core development team is in charge > of deciding the network consensus rules, and is responsible for making > changes to it in order to satisfy economic demand. If that is the > case, Bitcoin has failed, in my opinion. > Diverging from the satoshi block size change plan[1] and current economics would seem to require a high level of months-ahead communication to users. > all. Yes, old full nodes after a soft fork are not able to fully > validate the rules new miners enforce anymore, but they do still > verify the rules that their operators opted to enforce. Furthermore, > they can't be prevented. For that reason, I've proposed, and am > working hard, on an approach that includes Segregated Witness as a > first step. It shows the ecosystem that something is being done, it > kicks the can down the road, it solves/issues half a dozen other > issues at the same time, and it does not require the degree of > certainty needed for a hardfork. > Segregated Witness does not kick the can, it solves none of the problems #1, #3 - #8 explicitly defined and listed in email #1. 1) A plan of "SW + no hard fork" is gambling with ECE risk, gambling there will be no Fee Event, because the core block size is still heavily contended -- 100% contended at time out SW rollout. 2) We are only 100% certain that bitcoin works in the blocks-not-full-on-avg state, where there is a healthy buffer between the hard limit and the average block size. There is remains major ECE risk due to the core block size freeze, possibly pushing the system into a new, untried economic state and causing major market and actor disruption. Users of the Service can still drift randomly and unpredictably into a Fee Event. SW mitigates this - only after several months - only assuming robust adoption rates by up-layer ecosystem software, and - only assuming transaction volume growth is flat or sub-linear Those conditions *must* go as planned to fulfill "SW kicked the can" -- a lot of if's. As stated, SW is orthogonal to the drift-into-uncharted-waters problem outlined in email #1, which a short term bump does address.