It's actually about 16.8 MB, and it's very unlikely the block size will grow to anywhere near 16 MB immediately. Consider that it took 6 years for Bitcoin to go from 0 to 0.5 MB, despite the fact that the block size limit has allowed 1 MB blocks for the entire time. For one, there's limited demand for transactions with fees, and limited UTXOs with enough CoinAge to be spent for free. For another, miners have their soft limit, that caps the average block size.

But agree. I'd prefer a limit lower than 16.8 MB, but I don't think it's a big enough deal to ask for a different limit. We need consensus around one proposal, and Gavin's is the one that has the strongest chance of getting the support. And it might end up being beneficial to increase the limit by a substantial amount now, and give space for a major spurt in adoption.


Consider that consensus gets harder as the community gets larger. Also consider that relying on hard forks leads to the Bitcoin community having to centralize itself to some degree in order to achieve consensus on which hard fork to adopt. By making the block limit dynamic and not reliant on political consensus, we give Bitcoin the space to become more decentralized as a community, and reduce the risk of a hard fork going wrong. I'd rather just have one hard fork to set a dynamic block size limit, and get it over with, then have these debates, and risky hard forks, every four years.