I agree with the goal of never again having to do a hard fork to change the limit, but am not sure if linear increases are appropriate for a system that could grow geometrically.
Could you support starting with a 2MB cap that then doubles every year?
I'd might be OK with a 5MB cap that doubles when the block reward halves, depending on how it effects TOR/DSL users.
Could you support starting with a 2MB cap that then doubles every year?
I'd might be OK with a 5MB cap that doubles when the block reward halves, depending on how it effects TOR/DSL users.
Yes, a geometric increase is what I meant. Gavin's current proposal is for it to double every two years, meaning it increases 1.4X every year, which gives it a reasonably high chance of staying behind consumer bandwidth growth (and thus keeping the network highly decentralized).
So to answer your question, yes I would support something along the lines of what you're proposing. I think 5 MB would be much better than 2 MB though, because Bitcoin has a tendency to see sudden spurts in adoption, and so it'd be nice for it to have some room to grow quickly in the coming years.
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/
Quote
Summary: Users' bandwidth grows by 50% per year (10% less than Moore's Law for computer speed). The new law fits data from 1983 to 2014.
Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth states that:
a high-end user's connection speed grows by 50% per year
The dots in the diagram show the various speeds with which I have connected to the Net, from an early acoustic 300 bps modem in 1984 to an ISDN line when I first wrote this article (and updated to show the 120 Mbps upgrade I got in 2014). It is amazing how closely the empirical data fits the exponential growth curve for the 50% annualized growth stated by Nielsen's Law. (The y-axis has a logarithmic scale: thus, a straight line in the diagram represents exponential growth by a constant percentage every year).
Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth states that:
a high-end user's connection speed grows by 50% per year
The dots in the diagram show the various speeds with which I have connected to the Net, from an early acoustic 300 bps modem in 1984 to an ISDN line when I first wrote this article (and updated to show the 120 Mbps upgrade I got in 2014). It is amazing how closely the empirical data fits the exponential growth curve for the 50% annualized growth stated by Nielsen's Law. (The y-axis has a logarithmic scale: thus, a straight line in the diagram represents exponential growth by a constant percentage every year).
Thanks for posting.
And I think one thing that often gets lost in the discussion on the hard limit, and that I can't stress enough:
There are other ways to stop bloat besides a hard limit in the protocol. A protocol limit is the most crude and inflexible way to counter spam/bloat. If a 40-50% increase per year ends up being faster than connection speed increases, it is very unlikely that other means will not be found to limit block sizes.