Here is what I'm thinking: considering you are hell bent on selling the world on the value of the Bitcoin payment network, do you reasonably believe that Bitcoin is gonna make it to Paypal's level of TPS only in 2024? What if we get there less than 5 years from now? Is this really "unlikely"? I honestly don't think so especially if you and others have your way and attempt to fit every single transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Remember that "supply creates its own demand".
My concern is that I'm not sure it is safe for the decentralization of the network to try to handle 32mb per blocks within 2020, much less 64. In my mind this would necessarily imply an important if not dangerous decrease in the range of entities who are able to run full nodes. I don't want to hear anything about the amount of nodes as it is not a reliable indicator. As much as cypherdoc would like to believe that an individual running multiple nodes improves the decentralization of the network this is obviously not the case. Finally I'm also worried we would find ourselves in a much worse spot than we already are in regards to mining centralization.
My point is this reliance on block size increase as a scaling solution is a slippery road. One that if we do not travel through cautiously could seriously hinder the security of the network and ultimately result in turning Bitcoin into pale copy of Ripple.
Thank you for this response. I think it is was valid and I can appreciate your concern. I also think it serves to illustrate the ideological divide between you and me.
Me, I think the most probable way that Bitcoin fails is by lack of adoption and growth. I see the 1 MB limit as the greatest
technical blockage in this regard.
You, on the other hand, seem to be most worried about failure via centralization, and see a larger block size limit as contributing to the very failure mode you see as most likely.
And therein lies the problem. Although we both want success for Bitcoin, what I see as a panacea you see as a poison.
For the record, here's my take: we probably all remember the first time we received a real bitcoin transaction. I do. I was using the blockchain.info wallet on my iPhone and had purchased about 0.4 BTC from canadianbitcoins by depositing $20 cash into their RBC bank account. I remember a couple hours later my phone made a funny noise, and sure enough, boom, there was $20 of BTC in my wallet! I thought that was pretty amazing!! I then sent coins back and forth between different wallets, watching the transactions nearly instantly propagate, and the enormity of what was happening really sunk in: these transactions were being relayed to every node across the world, double, triple, quadruple checked, and then being logged to an unforgeable ledger that was stored redundantly all over the globe. And all this was happening--not because of some bank or government initiative--but because normal people came together to make it happen. And because it was a peer-to-peer initiative, access was so affordable that even the poorest of people on the planet could participate.
I think more people need to share that experience. And for that, we need bigger blocks.