Quote from: laurentmt on August 11, 2015, 02:30:32 PM

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One could argue that the Shannon Entropy in a new block will not in general be proportional to the size of the block, but that doesn't make any sense to me

I fear there's a misunderstanding here. The key point is the relation between the number of transactions and the size of the block (or the associated Shannon Entropy).
With mechanisms like IBLT, the quantity of information transmitted on the wire (Shannon Entropy) is constant, whatever the number of transactions in the block.

that's the way i always understood it as well. maybe Peter can elaborate.

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Unfortunately, "kicking the can" is a common pejorative term which can be thrown like mud at any interim solution.

Well, my intention was not to offend anyone with this term. Actually, I felt safe to write it because it was used by Gavin to describe its first proposal (as an interim solution).
I agree with you that there's nothing bad with a temporary solution... as long as the target solution is known beforehand.
And that's one of my problems with the current proposals. For now, there's no target solution which has been proposed and agreed by "everyone".

i agree with Peter that the "target" is to allow the miners and users to establish their own independent fee mkt w/o outside interference from centralized non-economically involved characters like core dev. no one knows exactly where that equilibrium lies but if you believe in free mkts then you believe they will work it out to theirs and everyone else's mutual advantage. it takes a Keynesian to believe that they will act to destroy others involved in an open system like Bitcoin for some short sighted interim gain that will only lead to their own self destruction with only a little bit more time.

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i agree with this view. the relay network is cutting corners and making risky shortcuts in relaying w/o essentially verifying. it only recently added a node in Beijing within the GFC. i wonder though if it's origins were a means of compensating for the top 5 largest miners being in China?
again, one of my reasons for wanting to increase blocksize is to increase competition in mining outside of China to those who have greater bandwidth. this would help level the playing field.

Imho, it's good that the relay network doesn't verify transactions. These verifications must be done by miners and this is an important part of their job in the decentralized network. Verifications done by the relay network would be a very bad incentive for miners, leading us to a very centralized system.

my pt was that the construction of the relay network might have been a knee jerk reaction to the same "large miner large block attack" FUD that has been spread around by the Cripplecoiners. it's author is a BS employee after all. it's only been around since Sept 2014. i'm not saying that the relay network has been bad for Bitcoin; it may even have been good. except that it is encouraging this non-verification scheme for tx's which as you say, may be gamed and has contributed to quite a perversion in analyzing this particular attack and was never visualized in Satoshi's original ideas. perhaps it is not necessary to exist. that is not to deny that it does exist and we need to adapt to it's presence.