Quote from: tl121 on August 19, 2015, 05:37:00 PM

Quote from: gmaxwell on August 19, 2015, 03:25:54 PM

Needs to be increased is tricky. The natural and necessary state for blocks is nearly full; defining need is hard. "Near-universally agreed to be good to increase" would be better, but people are sensibly worried that it would be held back by unreasonable people and so they are unwilling to take that risk.

The essence of Bitcoin's current problem can be found in this post. The problem isn't the words that I emphasized. It's that a core developer made such a statement.

It is absurd that any real-time system "needs" to run near saturation. This is so elementary it is hard to believe that a competent system designer would make such a statement. It is no wonder that some people are questioning motivation rather than technical judgment.

Posts like this make me grind my teeth so hard I think I should start holding a leather strap in my mouth before getting on the internet. Maybe a pillow to scream into would be therapeutic.

Everybody seems to be talking past each other right now, and not getting a good grip on what the actual problems are concerning block size increases.

Here is another analogy, that will probably be useless;
We want a community box that can hold as much weight and volume as we might want, and we want the average person to be able to carry the box unaided and without relying on some elite ubermensch to do it for us.
The only method we have to pay people to carry the box is by customers bidding for space in it. If the box becomes too big in relation to the demand to put stuff in the box, then the average person won't have any incentive to carry it.

So somebody manages to make a fairly small box that pretty much works for the most part, however we'd like to increase the size of the box if the average person will still carry it, and if profits are still good. No one owns the box though, so no one can make that decision. If nearly everyone votes to increase the size of the box, only then it will be increased.

Many of those voters are more than happy to make the box as big as possible, only being able to be carried by the elite ubermensch. However, many others refuse, saying that this goes against what the box was designed for in the first place! Not only that but the profits have been diminishing, and less and less people have been willing to carry the box lately.

They can't agree so the people that want a huge box instead decide they'll have a vote and if 75% agree we'll increase the box size anyway. Then the lately absent creator of the box charges in and says, "Hey woe, what the Hell dudes? You can't just impose your will on the 25%. Even a reasonable minority shouldn't be ignored."

~~And then somebody invented anti-gravity or something so the box was always weightless. There was much rejoicing.~~ The big box people insist that their opponents are being, "absurd", aren't "competent", and can't be trusted with the box. They're sure they'll get the people together to outvote the ignorant idealists, and make the change whether they like it or not!

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/010238.html
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons