Quote from: KurtB on August 20, 2015, 01:16:49 PM

Quote from: teukon on August 20, 2015, 01:37:33 AM

Quote from: KurtB on August 19, 2015, 04:28:16 PM

Quote from: Remember remember the 5th of November on August 19, 2015, 02:04:29 PM

Those 4 bytes have barely consumed over a megabyte in the 300k+ blocks we've mined.

It's copied and stored a million times, why not use the space more economically.

Because this entails:

The consumption of some development resources.
A more complicated protocol.
A greater potential for bugs.

The costs of dealing with this problem dwarf the potential gain of sparing all nodes 21MB/century of storage.

- Are developer resources busy arguing about the lack of capacity on each block?
- The protocol will be simpler because there is one field less or what am I missing?
- Less complexity reduces the potential for bugs, the implementation, as every change, presents a possibility for error.

Developers are certainly contending different capacity/decentralisation trade-offs and implementations thereof. In this context, 21MB/century is wholly insignificant.
The blocks would be simpler. The protocol would be more complicated. The protocol must be able to understand all of the blocks in Bitcoin's history.