Lets implement a maximum block size that can adjust to what is needed rather than just guessing at what might be needed? Lets build a protocol for the next 100 years, not the next 100 weeks? I think we can do better, and we currently have the time to do so.
The frustration with arguing with many of you is that you come at this issue as though it were an economic problem. It's not an economic problem. Economically, the block size should not be artificially limited.
...
Neither Gavin nor you nor any of the hard-fork crowd seem anxious to answer
this.
"
We are targeting the top {n}% of world population by gross income being able to perform {n} native Bitcoin transactions per year and pay {x}% of their transaction values to miners as fees. Here is our roadmap."
It seems unrealistic to complain about a lack of decent analysis without such a basic goal being stated.
It's interesting you use "roadmap" as your analogy. You are thinking in two dimensions. Bitcoin isn't about money management. Bitcoin will open transit systems (to extend your analogy) never thought possible. Bitcoin doesn't need to replace coinage because I imagine material scientists will design very difficult to counterfeit physical bills and tokens. Bitcoin doesn't need to replace lending or credit, because trust is how people help each other. Instead it will create trustless contracts between normally unreliable and even hostile producers and consumers. It will be a tool for economic expansion, not bean counting. So to answer your fast-food managerial level question about who gets paid: it isn't how big the block reward or fees are, it's how much you save and allow to deflate that will pay the biggest dividends.
You are making things far more complex than they need to be. I think you are trying to elevate the solution so some sort of a metaphysical level and this is subconsciously because you don't want to consider the engineering problems.
At the end of the day, when the parts of the ecosystem are broken down into their constituent components (and sub-components) we are looking at things that are not all that complex by the standards of other engineering problems we humans have solved. It is literally 'not rocket science'. It's not trivial either of course, but for better or worse, what Satoshi came up with was actually rather primitive in some ways.
An engineer who cannot or will not define and end-goal to some level of specificity is basically planning to fail. That is exactly what Gavin is doing whether by accident or design.
Anyway, it's a simple fill-in-the-blank type question that I asked. Wanna have a go at it? Nobody else seems to.
That's not what I mean at all. Bitcoin will create entirely new industries that don't currently exist like the internet has only begun to do. There will be plenty of incentives for operating nodes and resourceful ways to expand Bitcoin's pipelines. It's not just about Moore's Law, it's about a New Industrial Revolution, not some armchair philosophy. Your x-y financial charts will require a z-axis with Bitcoin.