Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Hard fork proposal from last week's meeting

From: David Vorick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2017 07:19:19 -0400

> What we want is a true fee-market where the miner can decide to make a
block
> smaller to get people to pay more fees, because if we were to go to 16MB
> blocks in one go, the cost of the miner would go up, but his reward based
on
> fees will go down!
> A block so big that 100% of the transactions will always be mined in the
> next block will just cause a large section of people to no longer feel the
> need to pay fees.

> As such I don’t fear the situation where the block size limit goes up a
lot
> in one go, because it is not in anyone’s interest to make the actual block
> size follow.

There have been attacks demonstrated where a malicious miner with
sufficient hashrate can leverage large blocks to exacerbate selfish mining.
Adversarial behaviors from miners need to be considered, it's not safe to
simply assume that a miner won't have reasons to attack the network. We
already know that large empty blocks (rather, blocks with fake
transactions) can be leveraged in ways that both damages the network and
increases miner profits.

In general, fear of other currencies passing Bitcoin is unsubstantiated.
Bitcoin has by far the strongest development team, and also is by far the
most decentralized. To the best of my knowledge, Bitcoin is the only
cryptocurrency out there that is both not-dead and also lacks a strong
central leadership.

A coin like ethereum may even be able to pass Bitcoin in market cap. But
that's okay. Ethereum has very different properties and it's not something
I would trust as a tool to provide me with political sovereignty. Ethereum
passing Bitcoin in market cap does not mean that it has proved superior to
Bitcoin. It could just mean that enterprises are really excited about
permissioned blockchains. That's not interesting to me at any market cap.

Bitcoin's core value add is and should continue to be decentralization and
trustlessness. Nobody is remotely close to competing with Bitcoin on those
fronts, and in my mind that's far more important than any of the other
mania anyway.