Peter, you know exactly what that means: centralization...
Before I respond to this, can you admit that both Greg and you were wrong (at least about the particular detail you called me out on above)? To be quite honest I didn't bother considering the math from the post I quickly digged up. I'm sorry my example was poorly chosen but to be clear that was Greg's point. It sounds you may have been right, about this particular factor.
Thank you.
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My point was to demonstrate that miners are increasingly tending towards schemes and centralization that can diminish their relaying costs and create possible unfair advantage which could be precipitated by an inconsiderate block size increase.
I agree that miners will form pools (like we see today) if doing so gives them an economy of scale. This is similar to the production of most commodities. For example, men panning solo for gold in a creek can no longer compete with the billion-dollar+ gold miners like Barrick.
I also agree that if Bitcoin becomes wildly successful and TX volume increases 1000 times, that people will require specialized hardware and high-end internet connections to run full nodes (I'll just use an SPV wallet on my phone).
What I don't agree with is that this will lead to a negative result: quite the opposite in fact! If we allow Bitcoin to grow, I expect to see vastly more user, more miners, probably more nodes, but definitely more security in numbers. I can't prove this, but no one can prove the opposite either.
My problem with the small-blockers is that they don't want to take the chance of success and instead want to commit us to failure. You are proposing adding a quota to block space production:
And permit a group of programmers to enforce that production quota for some greater good (that no one can really define). However, before we go down the road of production quotas, we should take a long look at other economies where they've been implemented. The most famous is of course the USSR, but even in Canada we have quotas on the production of eggs. These were originally implemented to ensure that farmers could earn a living wage and the public could enjoy a reliable supply of eggs; however, they now serve to keep small famers out of the commercial egg market and result in all sorts of lobbying and palm greasing (and higher prices for consumers). He who controls the quota wields the power to pick winners and losers...