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No. He is talking about the 970-980 kB blocks which not rare these days. While the average is around 300kB, that means we are at 1/3 capacity. And I personally think 1/3 is where we should seriously consider our options for scalability. The way people are split on the subject right now it is even more urgent to start getting a consensus.
But on the other hand there is no hurry and no crisis. The extra transactions can just go through altcoins if Bitcoin chooses the 1MB block + higher fees 'solution'.
They aren't rare, but they are not the norm. Most aren't near full.
F2Pool solved a few that were close recently, above 900K. With a good number of freebies.
https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000175b44859017a5148c48ecba7a67f14012232e9bb6b47a73
https://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000000f9597aed448ce8429c550a65f896b66760381d0c364901e
and then there is this 7K block in between
https://blockchain.info/block/000000000000000014efb22561313ebe3c27780808b5d8939ebc1a850badf9da
There are a lot of blocks with <200K, so we'd get some scalability of more Tx/s with a minimum block size too, but that would not be a good thing to do.
The more merchant involvement there is, the more we need to be thinking about the spikes associated with merchant business. We need to think about what happens at 8 AM Pacific Time on Black Friday - when the local credit card network in the places where I shopped couldn't handle the traffic and were knocked offline for an hour and then backlogged for the next six.
The more trader business there is, the more we need to be thinking about the spikes associated with exchange businesses. We need to think about what happened in the markets the next day after Jim Leeson took down Barents, when the mortgage meltdown chain reaction set in after Lehman Bros. defaulted and made $trillions evaporate overnight, when Madoff announced that his $billions were all part of a Ponzi scheme, and when Cyprus announced its plan to just TAKE whatever money people happened to have trusted banks with. When people finally take that 'Beware False Profits' message to heart, odds are they'll want to trade into Bitcoin. It'd be a real shame if they can't.
And we also need to consider the enormous follow-on effects of government decisions that change the rules more broadly. We need to think about what happens at 8 AM GMT on the International Currency Exchange the day after Brussels announces that Europe will either form a fiscal union (ie, have a uniform tax law and a uniform policy for allocation of the funds so collected) or end its attempt to have a common Euro fiat currency without one. 'Cause that's going to happen - what they've got now isn't a stable configuration in the long term.
I think there's all kinds of reasons why, when we need bigger volume, we're going to need enormous amounts of it very suddenly. The call for bigger volume is sometimes a result of predictable but large events, and sometimes a response to statistical 'Black Swan' events that result in a scramble to reach a new balancing point far from the old one.
We're seeing spikes to 1MB now, even without driving events we can point at. So, at the moment when 1MB definitively isn't enough, I fear that 5MB won't be enough either. Transaction volume in the real world is incredibly spiky in response to such events, and Bitcoin is starting to have closer and closer interactions with the 'real world.'
Cryddit