Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
I thought billyjoe was being silly and hyperbolic about the fight being over tor mining... Damn 
Oh yeah, and we need to focus on building a fee market at the 25 per block level...
Oh yeah, and we need to focus on building a fee market at the 25 per block level...
When do you propose we focus on this? When they disappear? Raising the block size is basically a subsidy. If you insist on constantly subsidizing transactions cost people will begin expecting it and it will be considerably more difficult to say no in the future. That is the slippery slope of raising the block size.
Miners are being subsidized in these early stages precisely because we want the security of the network to be greater than what would be provided using only the current fee income. This is part of BTC's competitive advantage. While this subsidy exists, the transaction cost should be as close to zero as possible to capture market share from other value transfer and storage systems. Growing now is what allows survival later.
Of course there are limits and dangers, I haven't been convinced that removing the limit entirely is safe or wise. I most identify with Jeff Garzik's approach to this debate (maybe not in bip100's proposed mechanism), and hope we find some common ground.
As I have just explained I think this is a dangerous road to follow as it amounts to selling people onto Bitcoin using features which are not inherent or guaranteed given its design. We should absolutely avoid the danger of instilling into Bitcoin users some kind of belief that they have a right to free transactions. Nothing in life is free and the costs of security & decentralization cannot forever be externalized to nodes & miners.
In that sense it is perfectly reasonable to suggest we should strive to keep block size limit as close as possible to actual network demand. Flex cap proposals are interesting in this aspect.
It's important to consider those who forgo investing in utilizing the system because it is currently capped at 2.7 effective tps.
If you put the actual cost (without block reward) of processing a bitcoin transaction on the user, bitcoin would die tomorrow. Maybe not completely, but it would be like pokemon cards for the "old money" hodlers.
You may think that permissioned sidechains will deliver us from not having the throughput to survive on fees alone, but I think that's an even bigger gamble.
It sounds corny, I agree, but billyjoe's Scale or Die has some truth to it.