Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements

From: Alex Mizrahi <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 31 May 2015 03:32:34 +0300

>
> Stop trying to dictate block growth limits.  Block size will be determined
> by competition between miners and availability of transactions, not through
> hard-coded limits.
>
Do you even game theory, bro? It doesn't work that way.

Mike Hearn described the problem in this article:
https://medium.com/@octskyward/hashing-7d04a887acc8

But the solution he's proposing is ridiculously bad and unsound: he expects
business owners to donate large sums of money towards mining. If it comes
to this, what sane business owner will donate, say, 100 BTC to miners
instead of seeking some alternatives? Proof-of-stake coins are already
there. I'm well aware of theoretical issues with PoS security, but those
theoretical issues aren't as bad as donation-funded cryptocurrency security.

But you know what works? Mining fees + block size limit.
Users and merchants are interested in their transactions being confirmed,
but block size limit won't allow it to turn into a race to bottom.
This is actually game-theoretically sound.

>   I see now the temporary 1MB limit was a mistake.  It should have gone in
> as a dynamic limit that scales with average block size.
>
This means that miners will control it, and miners couldn't care less about
things like decentralization and about problems of ordinary users. This
means that in this scenario Bitcoin will be 100% controlled by few huge-ass
mining operations.

Possibly a single operation. We already saw GHASH.IO using 51% of total
hashpower. Is that what you want?

Miners are NOT benevolent. This was already demonstrated. They are greedy.