Quote from: rocks on February 02, 2015, 07:52:16 PM

Quote from: NotHatinJustTrollin on February 02, 2015, 07:22:14 PM

Regarding the hard fork/scalability issue: I have never seen so much controversy regarding the way to deal with a problem in bitcoin within the bitcoin community.

You guys saying it's a "Solved problem" or one with an obvious solution?

Controversy IMHO is a good thing, it is the messy process of having a diverse set of individuals be responsible for their own destiny, as opposed to one of the many forms of centralized command and control.

What I do not like about the hard fork/scalability issue is bitcoin is not going through this messy process to make the change, but instead is having it's future be decided by a single individual by default.

Overall I have been very impressed by Gavin. I think his IBLT solution was brilliant, no change to the underlying protocol yet it incentivizes all miners to include all outstanding mem pool transactions. What's more miners are incentivized to switch to IBLT on their own since it lowers block propagation time in all cases.

But his hard fork proposal puts bitcoin on a dangerous auto pilot regarding block sizes. The initial 20x jump to 20MB blocks is fine, but automatically having 10 doublings to 20GB blocks is dangerous. What if we find out there is some scale issue at 128MB? It will take a hard fork to stop the ramp.

But what I really don't like about it is there hasn't been any real discussion. Gavin thinks everything will be fine, so it is. I work in tech and know processors really well. Compute scaling has slowed down and will further slow down, there are only so many cores that can be feed data to process. But the real issue is network, network does not double every 2 years.

I've been so bothered by it that I've started to contemplate building an affordable AWS node configuration that refuses to propagate the hard fork blocks and open that up. If enough people started such nodes then miners would see that the new blocks propagate more slowly and maybe stick to older blocks out of self interest.

Gavin's upgrade cycle requires 80% of blocks over 1000 block period to be new blocks, so if you can get a few pools to opt-out you can block the upgrade.

That's what I was talking about, some people here are like "no big deal, it's solved" while that scaling solution brings a plethora of other issues.

I'm pretty sure Gavin himself said that his solution "comes with risks" though.