You gavincoin people simply won't do the math. There is no realistic point where a decent fraction of the worlds population can use native Bitcoin and have it remain supportable by anything but the most well situated mega-players.
I would ask if you'd change your mind if the math showed you to be wrong, but we already know the answer to that, don't we?
You (nor anyone else) responded to my simple arithmetic showing we need 10,000 tx/sec or so for less than half the world to use Bitcoin once per day. Show me any example of anything remotely resembling a full scale Bitcoin network even existing in the real world, much less one under any sort of attack, and maybe I'll re-think my position.
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As I've said before, it I were planning an attack on Bitcoin, I'd to exactly what the gavincoin folks are doing, and I hypothesized about it years ago. I think it very possibly that this is one of the main incentives for trying to introduce exponential growth.
Here's the deal. I do NOT think that it is irrational to consider our 'best bet' to go the direction our leaderships map out for us. It is NOT irrational to trust the democratically elected political and social leaders over a band of often-criminal malcontents who happen to have a disproportionate number of chips at this point in the game. Most people 'love big brother' and I have no reason to think that Gavin and the folks involved with the Bitcoin Foundation are any different. Just the opposite in fact! For that simple reason it does not strike me as especially unlikely that they would like Bitcoin as a solution to be brought to heal and they probably see plenty of legitimate uses for it even when it is. For my part I simply dis-agree with this analysis and see Bitcoin as a pretty boring and useless, and mainly as just stepping stone toward a real solution if they get their way. I'm not ready to give up on Bitcoin just yet.
I'm pretty much with you on this, though I'm in favor or changing the 1MB limit. I don't like the proposed solution of 20MB + exponential increase and I would not fork to it (so count me as 'anti' for the poll). The proposal creates problems.
It is a sort-of simple proposal, (which is in its favor), but I think we can do better.
We aren't in a crisis, and there may not be a crisis for quite a while. Even having the horrible circumstance of queueing transactions (this already happens for low/no fee transaction), is not the end of the world for Bitcoin, but it will limit growth and adoption.
So since we have time to improve the proposal, this is what we ought to be doing.
If we are changing from a static to a dynamic limit, it ought to be sensitive to the need for increase rather than exponentially increasing. This could be either too high of a limit (and creating the potential for vastly increasing network costs unsupported by Bitcoin economy), or it could be too low (and we end up back where we are now).
I would support either a sensitive increase, or a static increase (which just kicks the can down the road but caps the risk), but not a dynamic one that has exponentially increasing risk.