Quote from: steeev on February 14, 2015, 03:59:19 AM

isn't the new bitcoin core all about the headers first/parallel downloads thing - getting the blockchain in about the same time as the torrent (3 or some hours ) now ?

also, reading Justus Ranvier's 'Economic Fallacies and the Block Size Limit, part 1 and 2' makes a compelling case for thinking about all this stuff differently to the gavin approach -

https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/2015/01/21/economic-fallacies-and-the-block-size-limit-part-1-scarcity/

https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/2015/02/09/economic-fallacies-and-the-block-size-limit-part-2-price-discovery/

I'm all for "letting the market decide" unfortunately we have no means for pricing the cost of transactions. Sure the transaction author can negotiate with a miner but he has no way of negotiating with every node operator in the world and every single one of them bears a cost for his transaction. Even if a node opperator has sizable bitcoin holdings it is unlikely that the befit of the increased value of his bitcoin as a result of his running a full node will outweigh the cost, so this cost is effectively "socialized" and he is expected to bear it for the sake of altruism.

The point is, we all would love to avoid central planing, but without the ability to make a market we have no alternative. This article presents a false choice, that of central planning vs allowing the market to decide, but there is no market here. The best we can hope for in terms of creating a market to address this problem is competition among crypto currency central planners, then the market can decide which central planners are producing the best monetary policy.

Dont think that im some sort of socialist. I'm as pro market as they come. This is just the unfortunate reality of the situation. I wish it weren't so.