Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Long-term mining incentives

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 May 2015 18:19:45 -0700

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Aaron Voisine <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Conservative is a relative term. Dropping transactions in a way that is
> unpredictable to the sender sounds incredibly drastic to me. I'm suggesting
> increasing the blocksize, drastic as it is, is the more conservative choice.
>

Transactions are already being dropped, in a more indirect way: by people
and businesses deciding to not use on-chain settlement. That is very sad,
but it's completely inevitable that there is space for some use cases and
not for others (at whatever block size). It's only a "things don't fit
anymore" when you see on-chain transactions as the only means for doing
payments, and that is already not the case. Increasing the block size
allows for more utility on-chain, but it does not fundamentally add more
use cases - only more growth space for people already invested in being
able to do things on-chain while externalizing the costs to others.

> I would recommend that the fork take effect when some specific large
> supermajority of the pervious 1000 blocks indicate they have upgraded, as a
> safer alternative to a simple flag date, but I'm sure I wouldn't have to
> point out that option to people here.
>

That only measures miner adoption, which is the least relevant. The
question is whether people using full nodes will upgrade. If they do, then
miners are forced to upgrade too, or become irrelevant. If they don't, the
upgrade is risky with or without miner adoption.

-- 
Pieter