Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Why Satoshi's temporary anti-spam measure isn't temporary

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2015 16:28:29 +0200

On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 4:05 PM, Gavin Andresen <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 8:50 AM, Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
> wrote:
>
>> Let's scale the block size gradually over time, according to
>> technological growth.
>
>
> Yes, lets do that-- that is EXACTLY what BIP101 intends to do.
>

Oh come on. Immediately increasing to 8 MB while miners currently don't
even seem to bother validating blocks?

With the added belt&suspenders reality check of miners, who won't produce
> blocks too big for whatever technology they're using.
>

Or a future where miners are even more centralized than now, which avoids
all problems relay and propagation speed has?

> So what do you think the scalability road map should look like? Should we
> wait to hard fork until Blockstream Elements is ready for deploying on the
> main network, and then have One Grand Hardfork that introduces all the
> scalability work you guys have been working on (like Segregated Witness and
> Lightning)?
>

Lightning does not require a hard fork, except that larger blocks would be
very useful for its bulk settlements.

Or is the plan to avoid controversy by people voluntarily moving their
> bitcoin to a sidechain where all this scaling-up innovation happens?
>

As I have said a dozen times now: sidechains are a mechanism for
experimentation. Maybe through them we will discover technology that allows
better on-chain and/or off-chain scalability, but people moving their coins
to a sidechain has far worse security tradeoffs than just increasing the
Bitcoin blockchain.

No plan for how to scale up is the worst of all possible worlds, and the
> lack of a direction or plan(s) is my main objection to the current status
> quo.
>

Ok, here is a proposal I was working on. I'd like to have had more time,
but I agree a direction/plan are needed to align expectations for the
future:  https://gist.github.com/sipa/c65665fc360ca7a176a6.

> And any plan that requires inventing brand-new technology is going to be
> riskier than scaling up what we already have and understand, which is why I
> think it is worthwhile to scale up what we have IN ADDITION TO working on
> great projects like Segregated Witness and Lightning.
>

And I think that the reason that so many people care about this suddenly is
because of a fear that somehow the current block size "won't be enough".
Bitcoin has utility at any block size, and perhaps more at some values for
it than others. Talking about "not enough" is acknowledging that we really
believe the block size should scale to demand, while it is the other way
around.

-- 
Pieter