It will help to assume that there is at least one group of evil people who
are investing in Bitcon's demise.  Not because there are, but because there
might be.  So let's assume they are making a set of a billion transactions,
or a trillion, and maintaining currently-being-legitimately-used hashing
power.  When block size is large enough to frustrate other miners, this
hash power (or some piece of it) will be experimentally shifted to solving
a block containing an internally consistent subset of the prepared
trasnsactions to fill it - experimentally at first, but on the active
Bitcoin network.  One seemingly random, bloated, useless (except for the
universal timestamp) block will be created and the evil group will measure
the effect on the mining community - client takedowns, market exits, and
whatever else interests them.  Then they lie in wait, perhaps let out one
more to do another experiment, but with the goal of eventually catching us
unawares and doing as much damage to morale as possible.

Good concrete descriptions of the threats against which we want to guard
will be very helpful.  Maybe there are already unit tests for such things
or requests for miners' reactions to them (as opposed to just the
software's behavior).  My description might be a bit too long and perhaps
not a very good example, but do we have a place where such examples can be
constructed?

While we will do our best to guard against such nightmares, it's also
helpful to imagine what we will do if and when one of them ever actually
occurs.  Yes, I'm paranoid; because those who like to control everything
are losing it.

Dave

On Sun, Aug 2, 2015 at 3:38 AM, Venzen Khaosan via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

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> +1 on every point, sipa
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