Quote from: NewLiberty on March 17, 2015, 08:00:09 PM

Quote from: smooth on March 16, 2015, 11:03:45 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on March 16, 2015, 10:56:37 PM

when you say "just sit back with their cold storage coins and see which fork wins out", you're essentially saying the forks are close in properties (or at least difficult to choose between).

No I'm kind of saying the opposite. If they are not close in properties then one will quickly win out, and I think we all agree that is not a problem at all. It isn't a problem for passive participants, nor active ones.

The minority of cases where the choice is more difficult, you basically have two choices. One is to pick one or the other (including status quo) essentially by fiat, or recognize that these decisions are difficult and let a market sort it out. I argue it is more important to do that now, when Bitcoin is tiny, rather than suffer long term from having made the wrong choice earlier when the costs of change were relatively insignificant.

I don't think we disagree that stability is important, I just think that stability at the multi-trillion dollar cap scale is better served by letting things sort out robustly and dynamically at the billion dollar scale, even if that introduces more risk short term (indeed that risk is what allows it to happen).

Take this whole block size thing. It's pretty clear no consensus will ever be reached. Doing nothing is an arbitrary decision. Making a change to 20 MB or 20 MB + {some growth rate} is also arbitrary. We're not going to "figure this out." I say let the market play out with the toy system we have today and whichever system thrives will be far stronger at the trillion dollar scale.
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I have a different opinion on this. I think we can and will "figure this out", once a commitment is made to doing just that. This is my fundamental disagreement with Gavin's proposal. It not only makes no attempt to figure it out, it takes away the impetus to do so for 20 years, when we have had Bitcoin for only a third of that time. This is what makes it such a jaw-droppingly misguided proposal unworthy of someone in his position.

Instead we are expected to undertake new risks without even the promise of the improvements needed to resolve the issue in either a long term manner (using a measured rate based on block-size need) or a permanent manner (removal of the limit based on it no longer being necessary).

Fair point. It may be that an effort at a better developed proposal would pay off in terms of consensus to implement it. I'm not sure about that given the conflicting and increasingly entrenched interests, but it's possible for sure.