Re: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud)

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

The 8 GB RAM module for the computer that runs my Bitcoin Unlimited node has 8 GB of RAM. I paid $67 for this memory module 13 months ago. I note that Amazon is selling the same module today for $35 USD. It is unreasonable to cripple bitcoin to support users running obsolete hardware.

Notice that setting up a full node does not benefit the node operator in anyway, and raise the block size will require thousands of such voluntarily setup nodes to upgrade. So I guess any rational human would refuse the node upgrade and pay the fee instead. I guess even the fee has risen to a prohibitive level, average user would still pay fee instead of setting up full nodes using dedicated hardware

It is not just that the fees will go up, there will not be enough space for everyone to transact regardless of the fee that they pay. It would also render transactions on the Bitcoin network much more unreliable.

It is not a rational decision for the network to prioritize full nodes over keeping the fees low. After all, the majority of users do not even run full nodes at all, why should they even care so much about servers in a datacentre. The benefits of low fees far outweigh the increased cost of running full nodes.

Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto

The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users.