Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;)
by
billyjoeallen
on 09/09/2015, 20:37:30 UTC
Storage (a hierarchy, in general), CPU power, and bandwidth are all potential bottlenecks and the future critical factor will depend in on the path of technological evolution which is difficult to predict. Most expect bandwidth, I believe.

Bandwidth is already a problem, because larger blocks already have a higher likelihood of being orphaned, and IMHO that's the point which makes blocksize discussion mostly hypothetical. Larger blocks are already unprofitable for miners, if they make large blocks it's out of goodwill.

Storage is the second issue, but that is fixable in the long run through pruning: no point in storing and replicating historic transactions that have long been over-confirmed. Historic transactions are irrelevant for bitcoin as a storage or value or a mean of payment, they are useful for validating, but that could be replaced by automatic check points every few months f.i., and everything historic beyond the last checkpoint could be pruned, keeping only the UTXO.

Yes but if orphan blocks is the only limitation, miners will simply demand a higher fee to overcome the probability of an orphan block. This will create a fee market. If the price of bandwidth drops then the fee will be driven down. All of this works provided that there is a block reward.

I draw the opposite conclusion. If larger blocks have a higher probability of being orphaned, miners will make their blocks as small as possible, even significantly under the maxblocksize limit. This is why the debate seems so silly. We don't need a software-coded block size limit at all.  blocks that are too big will get orphaned.  This is happening NOW.  It's why so few blocks are anywhere near the 1 MB limit. 

We don't pay miner fees to get xactions confirmed. We pay to get them confirmed quickly.  That is a market that exists TODAY.  We need larger block size limts to scale. We need to scale to get wider adoption. Wider adoption is another way of saying more decentralization (or accurately distribution) of users. Why is mining centralization the only centralization that smallblockers care about? 

7 TPS is a joke. We need a PREDICTABLE SCHEDULE of block size increases or a complete removal of a size limit. I am not opposed to Garzic's temporary 2 MB limit so that we can see what happens and evaluate the effects, but this needs to happen soon. Our competition is not sitting by idly watching this play out. They are  making plans to grab Bitcoin's market share. In some cases, they are already cutting into it.