By the way, I am still taking 1 BTC bets (subject to deposit in a 2-of-3 escrowed wallet) that the longest proof-of-work chain will contain a block larger than 1 MB by this time next year.
And still with a high degree of vaugeness about what is meant by 'the longest proof-of-work chain' I see.
I will say that in my mind, a change in protocol which is not agreed to by ALL of the currently active core contributors is not valid and it does not matter if it is long enough to reach from Earth to the edge of the solar system.
Btw if peter would be more serious about this, i'd take the bet.
I am quite serious. If the longest chain contains a block greater than 1 MB by this time next year I win, otherwise you win. The longest chain is defined as the chain built on top of the Satoshi genesis block with the greatest cumulative difficulty. If Bitcoin forks, then I only win if the "large block" fork has a greater cumulative difficulty than the "small block" fork.
As for escrow, I am open to suggestions. Danny Hamilton and Jonald Fyookball come to mind. We would each deposit 1 BTC into a 2-of-3 multisig address and the escrow would hold the third key.
I'd do it. I'm widely known as someone who is up-front and more than willing to admit my mistakes if evidence proves I've err'd. One might call me [in Latin] '
arbiter elegantiarum'.
I won't take the bet because as I've mentioned, I, as a staunch 1MB'r, would be delighted to see larger blocks as long as they are safe and necessary. This would indicate that it has exceeded the realistic capacity to support logical scaling mechanism such as sidechains and actually needs to scale internally. To wit, I will as mentioned consider the 1MB protocol to be obsolete if I sense that van der Laan, Maxwell, Wuille, Garzik, and Andresen all agree with an update to it.
Like many other clued in analysts and hodlers, it is obvious to me that mining consolidation is the Achille's heal of Bitcoin, and very well may be limiting it's growth at this time. Simply put, miners operate at the pleasure of the governments under who's jurisdiction they fall. Were it not for the fact that a reasonable parity of hashing power operates in two competing political and economic jurisdictions (The U.S. + EU-land minions, and China) Bitcoin might already be toast. As it is, the argument for strength is fairly tenuous and rests on the conjecture that the blockchain holds enduring value which could be realized on re-start after an attack. I can easily imagine the power structures in China, who probably doesn't care much about Bitcoin one way or another, horse-trading miner attacks for some other geo-political and/or economic goodies in a variety of situations. Or that it simply may threaten their own internal economic system in ways that are intolerable.
The above mentioned mining consolidation weakness is why I would not take the bet an the 'longest chain' wording. It is a word-trick and heavily pumped by the likes of Peter R. probably as the next-best hope for destroying Bitcoin after the implosion of the XT/BIP101 attack. Aside from that the words have no meaning without the all-important 'valid'. There are work-around to subjugation by political and legal pressure on the consolidated hashing power, but it is unclear how well they would work in practice.
Besides all of the above, I find it more likely than not that Peter R. is not betting with his own money. It seems highly possible that he is in fact betting with my tax dollars.
edits: slight