Quote from: poeEDgar on September 04, 2015, 05:30:24 AM

Quote from: johnyj on September 04, 2015, 02:42:22 AM

You can not simulate or test the social and economy impact of 8MB blocks in the test net, that's the key difficulty

No one can see the future of a complex decentralized social and economy system, the safest way is to make the change as small as possible, one small step at a time

Exactly. My thinking is that allowing for exponential scaling in this fashion is basically turning the blockchain into a testnet for the next two decades. There is too much money at stake to naively assume that nothing will ever go [very, very] wrong on the path to scaling 8000x in block size limit when we have never scaled past 1x.

An incremental approach is the only responsible approach. As I said above, we can probably safely run a 2MB block regime coming from a .5MB environment -- but an 8GB block regime from a .5MB environment? That's simply irresponsible. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Bitcoin is a giant living experiment, I do not think you can get around that no matter how much we prepare and plan. Some political experiments can only be carried out by actually implementing them on a large scale in reality, because the social dynamics are far to complex to attempt to predict and model every potential variable. The American revolution, Athenian democracy, central banking, fascism, the internet, the communist revolution, and there are many more examples in history where the only way to test such concepts is by actually implementing them in the real world. To think that Bitcoin should not be considered such a political and social experiment would be incorrect in my opinion. If we did apply this logic of needing absolute certainty of the effects of a hard fork it would in effect stifle all possibility for such a change. Since it is impossible to have such certainty in the first place, it in effect makes this an untenable position.

Quote from: VeritasSapere on September 04, 2015, 02:58:38 AM

Quote from: poeEDgar on September 04, 2015, 05:30:24 AM

I do like that idea, however that means we would have to hard fork on a regular basis. I do not think that this is practical or even possible without splitting Bitcoin, especially as more people become involved, it will become even more difficult to reach consensus. It would be better if we do not have to debate this again in a few years from now.

I keep hearing this. People need to get over the fact that bitcoin is, and has always been, a work in progress. This is absolutely not the last contentious debate the community will have (likely this will pale in comparison to future issues). And it is very, very silly to have the mindset that "this is the fork to end all forks." Irrational fear of controversy, and of the idea of hard forking in the future (i.e. making decisions) is not an adequate reason to push a reckless regime of exponential scaling.

I also do not think that this will be the last hard fork, if we do get a sufficiently large enouth block size I do think that this would be the last hard fork I can imagine myself ever supporting. Since I personally can not foresee what other things will need to be changed to Bitcoin. I do not think it even should be changed at all beyond what we are discussing now, in terms of hard forks atleast. I do expect there to be more hard forks in the future, this is of political necessity. I would also expect Bitcoin to split at the next hard fork as well. When that does happen I will be on the conservative end of the spectrum thinking that we should not change Bitcoin. One of the reasons why I do support increasing the blocksize now is because I consider not increasing the block size as being the equivalent to breaking the social contract. It is ironic that you accuse me for having a fear of controversy when I am the one that is supporting a controversial fork. lol

I do not necessary think that BIP101 is the best technical solution, however right now it is the only alternative client that is proposing to increase the block size through consensus. Which is why I keep stressing the point that I would support a third option as soon as it becomes real, especially if that third alternative would represent a compromise between these two extreme positions.