I would rather see voting by miners done in the future for changes to be made in the future, than see guesses made today applied far into the future.
For readers who have studied feedback control systems:
Q. How do you get a good closed-loop response?
A. Start with a good open-loop one.
The point is that the Bitcoin system
will need tweaking (feedback) at some point in time in the future. It is best if these tweaks are as small as possible. That means that the guesses we make now about the future (realize that there's no way
not to guess) should be as realistic as possible, thereby giving us a good open-loop response that needs as little feedback as possible to correct.
There's a faint suggestion here that there is only one possible way to make bitcoin scale up, and it involves guessing which block size corresponds to which required rate of transactions. Which implies you believe the whole thing scales up using block size increases only. Is this really what you're implying?
No, I'm just trying to make the point that there's no way
not to guess. A lot of people think the "static" 1 MB limit is somehow neutral while a growing cap is more of a guess. They're both guesses. One will turn out to be more accurate than the other and thus require less tweaking going forward...
On that note, starting with a good open-loop response is not the only way to get a good closed-loop one. There's another way: throw a lot of energy at your system! Or in Bitcoin's case, a lot of debate and arguments!!
Now imagine if Satoshi had taken another few moments when implementing the cap. He writes this in the code:
- "Let's set the cap at 1 MB for now
"
- "
but since Nielsen's Law suggests 50% growth per year, let's make the cap increase by 50% each year too
"
- "
this may need some tweaking in the future, but it's better to make a guess that's slightly off, than one that ridiculously off (like a static limit)!"
If he had done this, the blocksize limit would be set at 11.4 MB now and I bet everyone would be pretty happy. It would just be taken for granted that "of course the limit grows with time because the systems grows with time too!"