Quote from: traincarswreck on February 15, 2015, 06:46:58 AM

Quote from: solex on February 15, 2015, 06:43:32 AM

Indeed. Payment channels between nodes has enormous potential, and Bitcoin is better placed than any other technology to benefit because the payment currency is native to it. People who supply nodes already have wallets to manage the balances which will result.

D&T. I agree that 1MB is a joke, and have recently described it on your own thread as the biggest risk to Bitcoin.

Gavin's proposed change, plus IBLT, plus payment channels will strap solid-rocket boosters onto Bitcoin. I can't wait.

Ok then moving along, and me joining your dialog. I suspect that if we somehow locked in 1mb, bitcoin would be super scarce and price would skyrocket? No? The reason I ask, is if we render it a super gold in that sense, then greedy people might not let us change it to a higher size...

I suspect "price" is awaiting this decision.

Thanks for joining us.

The answer is already known, and "price" has already spoken.

http://coinmarketcap.com/#USD tells us what the market thinks. Bitcoin clones have a unit price which reflects their miniscule ecosystems, and the small opportunity value that one of them will ursurp Bitcoin's place, if it were to badly trip up (for example, such as having an artificially small block limit which is never changed).

Gold is finite, Bitcoin is finite, but cryptocurrency is infinite. As you, of all people, are fully aware, perfect money has to be scarce, it can't be infinite.

So, it is the network effect of many users, the whole ecosystem, the merchants, the publicity, the massive farms of hashing power providing security which give Bitcoin its price, and the potential to fully become electronic gold, super-gold. It's not block space scarcity which will ramp up price, but the total number of users it has and percentage of world transactions which it can process.

Realpra sums it up:

Quote

Well rationally there is no way the present Bitcoin can win over a higher limit fork:

Step 1:
A. Gavin creates a higher limit BTC fork.
B. Anyone else does it.

Step 2:
Present network can never grow more than it is now, because we are already hitting the limits.

Step 3:
New system takes over by nature of being the biggest - which it cannot avoid becoming because it scales!

Once Bitcoin plateaus in its adoption curve, then its super-gold status is secure, but not before. And it won't take as long as radio or TV.