...
What if consensus rules can be protected by means other than a sheer quantity of full nodes? What if we can bake them into Bitcoin's brand itself, with a pre-defined (4-year) schedule to revise and adjust them? We can then have multiple large full nodes in the system (like various block explorers today) which would provide a web interface for studying and inspecting every aspect of the blockchain without the necessity to run it at home. Any deviation from the consensus will be quickly noticed and the public will be alerted about the nodes and services that decided to deviate from it. The system would still remain perfectly transparent.
...
Such "fraud proofs" do not exist right now. You're asking us to trust corporations with the maintenance of the network!? You know a "block explorer" can be cheated right? Remember when Blockchain.info's block explorer showed that Satoshi had spent his bitcoins?
I agree, that it's somewhat less secure and would require some trust, but still if the rules are fairly small and simple, only one honest player in the ecosystem would be enough to prevent any potential conspiracy to deviate from the established consensus.
That, of course, implies that public still owns private keys from their coins and responsibly chooses full node servers (which comply with the rules) to transact in the network.
Well I have an average connection for Europe and i could easily support two gigabyte blocks from home, eight megabyte blocks would not be a problem at all. This person in Florida needs to either get a new internet provider or update his client by the sounds of it. lol
I agree that we should scale the blocksize according to the technical limitations that exist today. However it would not make sense to use the worst possible examples as our baseline. There will always be some people that can not run a full node because of bandwidth, even today. We should consider the bandwidth limitation for the majority of people, not just the few that have terrible connections. The Chinese miners have also clearly stated that they can handle eight megabyte blocks, and it is the pools that are most effected by block propagation after all.
How long would it take to transmit a 10mb block across the network? It can't be more than a few seconds. Besides, this debate about block size should be settled now. Sooner is better than later.
As discussions on previous pages indicated, linear increase in block size may cause the effective bandwidth in the network to grow exponentially due to peers sending the same data to each other many times. So it's not 1MB per every 10 minutes, the actual bandwidth is much higher.