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

From: Ángel José Riesgo <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2015 18:06:14 +0200

Hi everyone,

I'm a long-time lurker of this mailing list but it's the first time I post
here, so first of all I'd like to thank all of the usual contributors for
the great insights and technical discussions that can be found here. As
this is such a momentous point in the history of Bitcoin, I'd just like to
throw in my opinion too.

First, I agree with Oliver Egginger's message that it's much more elegant
to keep the numbers as powers of 2 rather than introducing somewhat
arbitrary numbers like 20. This also makes it easier to count the level of
support for what would be a clear spectrum of discrete levels (1, 2, 4, ...
32, 64, ..., infinite). If a temporary peace accord can be reached with a
value like 8 or 16, this will buy us some time for both the user base to
continue growing without hitting the limit and for newer technologies like
the lightning network to be developed and tested. We will also see whether
the relatively small increase causes any unexpected harm or whether (as I
expect) everything continues to run smoothly.

Personally, I'd like to see Bitcoin grow and become what I think most
Bitcoin users like myself expect from it: that it should be a payment
network directly accessible to people all over the world. In my opinion, it
is the proposition of Bitcoin as a form of electronic money that
additionally makes it a good store of value. I don't believe in the idea
that it can exist as just some sort of digital gold for a geeky financial
elite. And I haven't been persuaded by those who claim the scarcity of
block space is an economic fundamental of Bitcoin either. It seems to me
there's a lot of batty economic ideas being bandied about regarding the
supposed long-term value of the cap without much justification. In this
sense, my sympathies are with those who want to remove the maximum block
size cap. This was after all the original idea, so it's not fair for the
1MB camp to claim that they're the ones preserving the essences of Bitcoin.

But, anyway, I also think that a consensus at this point would be much
better than a head-on confrontation between two incompatible pieces of
software competing to gain the favour of a majority of exchanges and
merchants. With this in mind, can't we accept the consensus that raising
the hard-coded limit to a value like 8MB buys us a bit of time and should
be at least palatable to everyone? This may not be what the staunch
supporters of the 1MB limit want, but it's also not what I and others would
want, so we're talking about finding some common ground here, and not about
one side getting their way to the detriment or humiliation of the other.

The problem with a compromise based on a one-off maximum-size increase, of
course, is that we're just kicking the can down the road and the discussion
will continue. It's not a solution I like, but how can we get people like
say Greg Maxwell or Pieter Wuille to accept something more drastic? If they
find a new maximum-size cap acceptable, then it could be a reasonable
compromise. A new cap will let us test the situation and see how the
Bitcoin environment reacts. The next time the discussion crops up (probably
very soon, I know...), we may all have a better understanding of the
implications.

Ángel José Riesgo