Quote from: tvbcof on July 06, 2015, 05:25:29 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on July 06, 2015, 04:57:51 PM

Quote from: tvbcof on July 06, 2015, 04:52:31 PM

Quote from: iCEBREAKER on July 06, 2015, 01:28:25 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on July 06, 2015, 10:28:19 AM

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3. How is it that 1MB just "happened" to be the magic number at which blocks are deemed to be "large" ?

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3. Time to verify (via CPU-hard although parallelizable ECDSA) incoming block's tx is already (absent clusters of 48-core Xeons) problematic at sizes near 1MB, hence use of the subjective descriptor "large" and your conflation of that term with "full."

Whether 1MB is ideal or not, it's what we have. It's pretty evident that Bitcoin would be lucky to avoid annihilation on attempts to change it in any way at this point in time. That may or may not be the case in the future.

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In retrospect, 1MB seems like a pretty ideal setting for the past history of Bitcoin and some distance into the future. To me.

it's a Magic Number!

no, it was always meant to be a DoS prevention mechanism and Satoshi foresaw much wider and greater usage of Bitcoin as a worldwide p2p cash system to challenge the big banks:
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We don't know who Satoshi was and if what 'he' said about this or that is even especially reliable. Assuming it is, we don't know that he said exactly what he was thinking.

If Satoshi said that he wanted to build a niche monetary system for big players and insiders to use as a reserve currency, I would not have been interested and would not have gotten involved. Only after having dwelt on it some did I come to the conclusion that in spite of the faults and somewhat distasteful nature of the solution, it is the best way to have a chance of enduring success (and thereby at least partially dislodge those who do the same under a vastly inferior monetary system design such is our current crop of fiat solutions.) So, Satoshi may well have tuned much of his writings (and code) to play on social pressures as much as computer science ones.

From a fairly early stage Satoshi seems to have gathered a contingent of fairly small-minded adherent (in addition to some brilliant ones such as Hal.) Lesser minds tend to be attracted to shiny and simplistic things such as the 'Bitcoin is everything to everyone always and forever' philosophical construct. I don't find it at all difficult to believe that Satoshi may have tuned his messages to retain these folks and build a 'critical mass' using these as footsoldiers. If it were that or nothing, that is preferable in the battle to achieve a viable solution.

that's pretty sad but totally expected from you.

if you'll recall, it wasn't actually that long ago when i was of similar thought; doing nothing to the protocol. ever.

but reading some of JR's stuff and thinking about the concept of digital gold, i think Bitcoin has to be reliably and cheaply accessible by everyone worldwide for maximum decentralization and value. whether that's achievable via future tech improvements remains to be seen but we need to try. otherwise, gold will continue to be used and valued by an outside large contingent that won't bother with Bitcoin and will even compete to a very large degree.