Quote from: cypherdoc on May 27, 2015, 03:54:56 PM

yes, the avg Venezuelan doesn't care about running a full node. he cares about reliable, cheap tx's. sad thing is, if we stay at 1MB blocks, he might never know about Bitcoin. and he certainly will never learn about the more complex concept of digital gold.

Bitcoin isn't going to fail because of full blocks. I find your lack of faith disturbing. As New Liberty said, "Sell your fear elsewhere."

It may experience temporary graceful degradation, but such adversity is required by antifragile systems in order to grow stronger.

Avg. Jose doesn't yet care about full nodes because he's never heard of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin hasn't yet closed the loop w/r/t fiat exclusion.

The infrastructure needed to onboard Avg. Jose, such as Lightning/Sidechains/linear UXTO scaling, is still in the ~~vapor~~ R&D stage.

Coddling BTC with lavish 20mb blocks, at the first hint of a possible sign of a whiff of tx fee pressure, decreases motivation to complete and implement that infrastructure and those optimizations.

BTC hype is largely driven by its price in fiat. Price increases, not tps capacity, are what will sustain the next waves of publicity, awareness, and adoption.

What do you think the Great Schism and associated FUD are doing/will do to the price of BTC?

Will buyers think 'oh goody, BTC's stock is about to split into a parent corporation and a GavinCoin spin-off' or, 'holy shit, wtf do you mean I have to spend on both chains or abstain from transactions until the fork is resolved?"

Quote from: cypherdoc on May 27, 2015, 04:29:24 PM

it's reasonable to assume if we get 10x users, we'd get 10x #full nodes, and 10x the value. we can't do that with a technical cap.

The soft 1mb cap is protecting us from the hard (but uncertain) UXTO cap. It was put in place for another reason, but also happens to be a serendipitous magic number.

Until UXTO optimization/pruning can keep set growth (sub)linear, Bitcoin cannot replace Western Union, much less Visa.

To quote the great davout,

Quote

The true value that Bitcoin brings to the table is not "everyone gets to write into the holy ledger", it is instead "everyone gets to benefit from sane and non-inflationary financial instutions whose sanity and honesty are ensured by the holy blockchain".