Re: Thanks to people who support 1-2 MB blocks

whats disheartening is seeing how poeple are so afraid of the tiniest changes, bitcoin development grinds to a halt.

Even if people make a hard fork to 1.5MB, it wouldn't be tiniest of changes.
Stopping mining pools to run a new daemon is easy and all, but the problem is that the world wouldn't update all at once, and the whole Bitcoin "ecosystem" would have a temporary problem with the "2 blockchains".

I think they can all update at once, like BitcoinXT planned to do, everyone run the new software which runs old code until some high percentage of blocks are hashing with the new version. and one time there was an emergency hard fork without any of this fancy way of updating everyone all at once and it took a few hours for the new chain to catch up.

i'd argue that not changing the 1MB is a change in itself, we were promised this limit would move up as needed. satoshi knew what that would do, and he talked about SPV clients becoming more important as time went on. not changing the limit is changing the game plan in a big way.

"i'd argue that not changing the 1MB is a change in itself" <--- I like this point. I would add that not changing is not the same and shouldn't be evaluated as a proxy for something else that isn't yet invented or otherwise ready-to-go as an alternative (ex: sidechains or LN). From what I can understand, sidechains and LN will be groundbreaking/important regardless of blocksize. I get the feeling that a lot of folks see sidechains/ln as mutually exclusive w/ XT or any other blocksize increase BIP.

Related question: If you have time, what are the best two or three arguments against raising blocksize in your (or anybody else's) opinion, notwithstanding whether you agree with them?

My background is not tech, and I'm positive I'm in the same boat w/ tons of folks, so some short bullet points would be helpful for us non-techies. From what I can tell, the best arguments against increasing blocksize are things like: 1) security (decreased node count), 2) unreasonable economic barriers (objections based on specific BIPs (Blacklisting argument against XT) seem less concerning b/c they're fixable and negotiable). Are there obvious solutions to the strongest arguments (whatever those are to you) that resolve the concern and still increase blocksize?

1. Centralization of nodes
2. Centralization of miners

Whether nodes will "Centralize" is somewhat of an assumption, and does also depend on the rate of increased adoption. Since when more people know about Bitcoin more people will be running full nodes, the exact balance between the difficulty of running a full node and the number of people running full nodes in the future is impossible to predict.

I do not think that increasing the blocksize would lead to increased mining centralization. Since miners do not run full nodes, the pools do. Miners are free to point their hashing power wherever they want and they are incentivized to do what is best for Bitcoin. There is in effect a free market of pools, which act as a type of representative democracy for the miners. This is why increasing the block size would not lead to increased mining centralization, even with much larger blocks miners are not effected whatsoever since the pools which run the full nodes for mining can be set up in data centers almost anywhere in the world.