Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Block size following technological growth

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2015 16:53:29 +0200

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 4:21 PM, Gavin Andresen <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 10:06 AM, Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
> wrote:
>
>> But you seem to consider that a bad thing. Maybe saying that you're
>> claiming that this equals Bitcoin failing is an exaggeration, but you do
>> believe that evolving towards an ecosystem where there is competition for
>> block space is a bad thing, right?
>>
>
> No, competition for block space is good.
>

So if we would have 8 MB blocks, and there is a sudden influx of users (or
settlement systems, who serve much more users) who want to pay high fees
(let's say 20 transactions per second) making the block chain inaccessible
for low fee transactions, and unreliable for medium fee transactions (for
any value of low, medium, and high), would you be ok with that? If so, why
is 8 MB good but 1 MB not? To me, they're a small constant factor that does
not fundamentally improve the scale of the system. I dislike the outlook of
"being forever locked at the same scale" while technology evolves, so my
proposal tries to address that part. It intentionally does not try to
improve a small factor, because I don't think it is valuable.

What is bad is artificially limiting or centrally controlling the supply of
> that space.

It's exactly as centrally limited as the finite supply of BTC - by
consensus. You and I may agree that a finite supply is a good thing, and
may disagree about whether a consensus rule about the block size is a good
idea (and if so, at what level), but it's a choice we make as a community
about the rules of the system we want to use.

-- 
Pieter