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.
It would be great if you could read the actual proposal and show where the problem is specifically, rather than just list your a priori assumptions.
Fair enough. I perhaps did not give the author the credit that was due. He is quite aware of the problem. I need some time to read and digest this
https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments and also some time to figure out if, even if we had unlimited free micro payments, there is a means of dealing with hold out problems.
*edit* Wow this is huge if he is right. If he is and the hold out problem can be sufficiently mitigated than we dont just have a model for solving the max block size problem, this will by default also solve the problem of how to decentralize the entire internet.
*edit2* wow wait thats you. you wrote it. lets talk. pm me. better yet can we skype some time?
I missed that one. I'll need a lot more coffee to sort through that api proposal. That sounds like the right direction we need to be going.