If wumpus thinks blocks should be full,
then I'd like to see his reasoning. Gavin has outlined his stance with his
blocksize economics and
scalability roadmap posts. A continuous stream of full blocks isn't something we've tried before and we need to see a really convincing argument to justify attempting it.
Gavin gets it wrong. Big deal.
You know, there's a reason in business, why it's usually not the code-monkeys who get to make strategic decisions.
So there's no reasoning or justification? Just an opinion? Thought as much.
So far no one has given me a satisfactory response to this:
If the userbase increases and blocks are full, the choices are as follows:
- Pay an average fee and still wait for the next available block that isn't full (which will take longer and longer as more users join, even if you pay a fee)
- Pay an above-average fee and hope that it's more than everyone else is paying (and if you don't guess correctly, wait for the next block)
- Go off chain and hope that whoever you trusted doesn't run off with the coins
- Use another coin
Maybe if you actually phrased it like a question it'd be easier to answer.
And it would certainly be easier for the one who answers to show that the assumptions the question is based, are biased.
I've phrased it multiple ways throughout the course of this thread. You still can't give an answer that doesn't amount to "it works for me, so to hell with everyone else":
Because it is my considered opinion that Bitcoin is perfect as it is and that it doesn't need to be "fixed" to provide tremendous value to humanity at large.
And you have the nerve to talk about bias? If you can't or won't consider the consequences of a 1mb limit to the
majority of users, you don't get to lecture about bias. Again, users aren't going to support a network that doesn't confirm their transactions in a timely and secure fashion. Full blocks means either wait for an available block, or go off chain and introduce risk.
Also, I like how you left Mike Hearn's reply out of your earlier post about that
reddit quote:
[]mike_hearn - 14 points - 6 days ago
If all blocks were full and a backlog was building in memory then Bitcoin would be broken. Bear in mind the mempool is unlimited in size. Transactions would stop confirming, nodes would crash and fall over as they accepted ever more pending transactions. That's clearly the wrong time to try and organise a network upgrade. You do it in advance, not as the system is crashing down around us.
Obviously there are risks to any change in a live system. I am not a fan of consensus driven decision making for this reason - it tends naturally towards stasis. The reason is if some people say "no it's too risky", the change is made and things are fine, nobody remembers the objections. The reputation of the naysayers hardly suffers. Everyone is just happy that the improvement happened and wants to move on. If some people say "no it's too risky" and then there are problems, they look prescient and wise and can easily have a told-you-so attitude. And unfortunately then the people who were trying to improve things can easily lose influence and things grind to a halt. "You're not being careful enough with other peoples money" is the sort of argument that socially has a lot of weight, and can quickly result in nobody doing anything because nobody wants to stick their neck out.
This is the story of many large organisations that get big and slow, and given how many years this block size thing has been playing out over, I think it's easy to say it's happening in Bitcoin too.
At any rate, Bitcoin cannot stand still. Usage is growing and failing to tackle that growth will result in either a technical collapse or (another) fork of the software by people who are building companies on the assumption of mass adoption, but whatever happens stasis will not be it. I think everyone understands that, and Gregory just said in IRC he thinks 1mb is too small. So it turns into a debate about how long we can wait for, exactly, and what has to come first, which is rather different to how you are portraying things.