Quote from: Peter R on August 16, 2015, 11:37:21 PM

Can you explain which insights you're referring to? It looks to me like mostly technical misunderstandings about how a fork would play out combined with a lack of knowledge about Bitcoin. For example, explain how this is true:

"If Gavincoin wins, Bitcoin holdhouts lose nothing and Gavin supporters gain nothing. If Gavincoin flounders, Gavin supporters lose everything"

I think you're just pulling for straws and interpreting "lose everything" in your own way but I will play along. Maybe quoting some Mircea will knock some sense into some people here. Don't worry I should spare you the ad hominems and try not to hurt anyone's feelings.

Let's first point out general fallacies shared and painted all over this very forum & reddit:

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III. I don't understand why anybody would be against a larger block.

The popular name to this is "arguing to ignorance". What you understand or don't understand is not a proper subject of discussion, and you aren't welcome to try and foist it on intelligent people who aren't your parents.

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IV. Satoshi himself envisioned much larger blocks.

This is called "arguing to authority", and it tries to give pecuniary value to that only truly worthless article of all times and places : the esteem of the mob.

Later in the same article we observe a reasonable and practical observation of what a future with Bitcoin will and should look like. To quote :

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For the reasons noted and for many other reasons I am pretty much satisfied that Bitcoin is not nor will it ever be a direct means of payment for retail anything. You may end up paying for a month's worth of coffee vouchers at your favourite coffee shop via Bitcoin (so shop scrip built on top of Bitcoin), you may end up settling your accounts monthly at the restaurant in Bitcoin (so store credit built on top of Bitcoin), you will probably cash into whatever local currency from Bitcoin (be it Unified Standard Dubaloos or Universally Simplified Dosidoes or whatever else) but all that is entirely different a story.

About our actual argument, he seemingly shares my concerns:

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VI. This is a clerical issue, because block propagation and other considerations incentivize miners to keep blocks small anyway. The 1MB is just a hard limit getting in the way of things, the marketplace of miners should be allowed to fix block size as it seems appropriate.

While this argument has been disingenuously brought by Gavin himself, the fact is that the proposed inverted bloom filters upgrade would allow all blocks to propagate in constant time, regardless of their size.

Some might still ask: why is that?

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davout: gavinandresen: "oh, the IBLT stuff? yes, thatd make propagation O(1)" <<< so with that, there's no network bottleneck anymore, at least no real incentive for miners to keep blocks small, right?

gavinandresen:davout: Miners would only have the meta-incentive of we can collectively maximize revenue if we make blocks THIS big

Except miners are not a person. They are multiple, geographically diverse groups of interests each bounded by different resources, costs and infrastructure. I kind of happen to think that this is what is broken with the "nodes and miners should be able to decide on whatever block size they like" proposition. I can also see clear as day through the attempt of many here at rationalizing this behavior as "free-market decides best, how dare you propose centrally designed SPAM CONTROL."

The assumption you seem to make is that miners & nodes (through the magic of the "invisible hand" I suppose) will arrive at an equilibrium of decentralization in some kind of benevolent act "because incentives & game theory". If we consider that the argument about cost of creating large block is moot, the rational then becomes: miners will act in an altruistic way to conserve trust of the network.

These points are not very clear to me. I don't imagine a scenario where several resourceful corporations do not turn this into an arms race that few will be able to keep up with. We are now only beginning to see mining and network infrastructure enter professional stage. If the incentive to mine Bitcoin increases the seemingly amateur and small scale set ups should soon be erased off the network and replaced by massive datacenters that should outnumber any of these small players so as to make their "voice" in the balance exercise of decentralization vs. block size worthless.

You might imagine that as "bitcoiners" realize this issue they will "protest" but I suggest that by this point A. you will not be able to actually become aware of the problem and B. there will be nothing to do about it as the network will have become "captured" because of "network ossification" and the general laziness of the herd which will prefer comfort and stability over change and doubt.