Quote from: johnyj on December 31, 2015, 05:48:37 PM

Bitfury's paper here:

http://bitfury.com/content/4-white-papers-research/block-size-1.1.1.pdf

"The table contains an estimate of how many full nodes would no longer function without hard-ware upgrades as average block size is increased. These estimates are based on the assumption that many users run full nodes on consumer-grade hardware, whether on personal computers or in the
cloud. Characteristics of node hardware are based on a survey performed by Steam [19]; we assume PC gamers and Bitcoin enthusiasts have a similar amount of resources dedicated to their hardware.

The exception is RAM: we assume that a typical computer supporting a node has no less than 3 GB RAM as a node requires at least 2GB RAM to run with margin[15]. For example,if block size increases to 2 MB, a node would need to dedicate 8 GB RAM to the Bitcoin client, while more than a half of PCs
in the survey have less RAM."

Based on his estimation, raise the block size to 4MB will drop 75% of nodes from the network

Thanks for the link. I'll read it in its entirety.

However, from my perspective, that latter statement is nothing but a rather weak assumption. According to bitnodes, there are currently about 5650 nodes in operation. Do you really think that a significant percentage of them have less than 8 GiB RAM? Even if they do today (which I do not for a minute believe), it currently costs well under 0.1 BTC to purchase 8 GiB memory. Your assumption that requiring this much RAM will knock a significant percentage of nodes off the network is simply incredible, in the literal sense of the word.