Quote from: smooth on June 21, 2015, 02:16:38 AM

Quote from: cypherdoc on June 21, 2015, 02:01:48 AM

Quote from: smooth on June 21, 2015, 12:03:21 AM

Quote from: cypherdoc on June 20, 2015, 11:28:02 PM

Quote from: smooth on June 20, 2015, 11:02:52 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on June 20, 2015, 08:36:43 PM

Finally an adult weighs in:

http://konradsgraf.squarespace.com/blog1/2015/6/20/preview-the-market-for-bitcoin-transaction-inclusion-and-the.html

I agree with him that the block size limit is an anti-spam feature and should be treated as such, but the question is why (for example) 20 MB of spam is considered acceptable now. I see no good reason to allow 20x as much spam, when little to nothing has been done to control spam in any other way.

according to the new XT code today, the max would be 8MB, with doubling every 2y if 75% miners up-version.

you'd have to believe, for all the same reasons we've argued against for yrs, that a large miner would be willing to risk paying 8MB worth of spam tx fees for a prolonged period of time to try for the fuzzy goal of driving smaller miners out of business over an unspecified period of time, which may never come, and which comes at great risk to themselves from orphaning.

Not necessarily. It could be more of a gradual process of spam being accepted into a system that isn't well protected against spam. The miners who are better equipped to produce somewhat larger blocks produce them (by including lower value, lower fee transactions aka spam), which puts more of a strain on smaller miners who drop out. As smaller miners drop out, the average block size then increases, which puts even more strain on the slightly-less-small miners, who then drop out, repeating the process.

The end result is larger spammier blocks, and less broad participation in mining.

The fact remains that as I said there is no more of a mechanism to control spam other than a block size limit than there was when satoshi added the block limit, and I don't really see how spam is ~~20x~~8x less of a problem or potential problem now. I'd support a smaller increase though, since I do see technological progress as having reduced the threat of spam by a smaller factor.

Longer term I see the 8 MB and auto doubling every two years as even worse than 20 MB. There is no rational basis to believe with high confidence that gigabyte blocks would be acceptable in 15 years.

if you are not claiming any relative connectivity advantage of a large vs small miner, why does a large block filled with spam cause a small miner to choke anymore than another large miner?

and if ANY miner, large or small, receives a large block that requires extra processing time, he can immediately resort to the defensive mechanism of hashing an empty block header until he finishes processing the large block. then he goes back to hashing a normal block with tx's. we saw this exact behavior in the Stress Test.

The issue is not necessarily large or small as much as it is connectivity to a majority or near-majority of the hash rate.

yeah, but as stated by the Chinese miners, they don't have superior connectivity. in fact, it's lower connectivity. thus, how can these largest 5 miners of all be a problem to small miners?

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tvbcof, I agree with you that two days isn't out of the question for critical and high-value transactions, but Bitcoin main chain handles those perfectly well too, without the added cost and delay, and without security compromises. The competitive advantage of involving a sidechain specifically for critical or high value transactions is nil or negative.

tvbcof is being brash about 2d tie ups. that would be a catastrophic loss of his coins in a SC failure. he'd never get his scBTC mined back to BTC.