Quote from: johnyj on December 28, 2015, 12:10:18 AM

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on December 27, 2015, 11:55:33 PM

Quote from: johnyj on December 27, 2015, 11:39:20 PM

And the block size limit has nothing to do with free market, it is just a measure to prevent spam attacks, without this limit, a bank can jam the traffic on bitcoin network for months, so that no transaction can be done at all

This makes no sense. The current limit basically provides a lower bar for the nefarious banking institution organizing the attack. The attacker has less room to fill to effectively price out all other transactions. It makes the attack cheaper.

I have heard arguments that the limit should be used to "foster the growth of a fee market" which really means raising tx prices via an artificial, centrally planned, capacity limit. Miners, the producers of new block space, should determine the optimum size blocks to create while accounting for orphan risk and the health of the entire network. Harm the network and they harm their future earning potential. Create a huge block that takes forever to verify, be prepared to be orphaned by a chain of smaller blocks.

max-block-size, if necessary at all, should be a circuit breaker or malicious miner protection only. Not an economic policy tool. Satoshi understood free market incentives, he designed the system around them, they should be allowed to work.

Attacks being cheaper or expensive means nothing for malicious large institutions, but if they are unable to stop the normal function of bitcoin network, then the attack is just wasted resource. A large block gives attacker such possibility to stop the traffic of all nodes because all they need to do is sending out large blocks that takes forever to verify (You don't know how long to verify a block unless you have already verified it), and if they control some super nodes that can quickly verify such kind of blocks, that will give them more chance to orphan the rest of the network since no one is able to keep up with their verifying speed

Of course this special kind of dust sweeping block can be prevented at nodes level, but currently there is no fix yet as I know. And when you start to police on what kind of transaction is illicit then you really start to act like a government organization Wink

In your scenario they would need a huge amount of hashing power to actually make their own giant blocks. If that's the case... we've got bigger problems than block size, and they could do much more destructive things than just a big block attack.

A simpler, and cheaper attack would just be to waste some btc on fees to completely fill 1MB blocks, pricing out everyone else...

The only security against nation states with hundreds of billions of $ at their disposal is either through obscurity (monero) or through ubiquity (too big and important to attack).