Quote from: Zangelbert Bingledack on January 03, 2016, 02:38:14 AM

Quote from: smooth on January 03, 2016, 02:19:21 AM

"We would be trying to predict what the market would decide, "

@Zangelbert Bingledack, I'm somewhat sympathetic to your cause but I don't really see how the market mechanism operates here, outside of a very broad definition of "market" which encompasses politics. Node voting doesn't work at all. Without that you are still reduced to politics and whoever shouts the loudest in trying to convince miners what block size they should use.

Well that's how it is anyway, and even now the market does decide. My point is that there's market friction in the inconvenience barrier of users not being able to set the blocksize cap themselves. That gives artificial solidity to the Schelling point set by Core (as well as the one set by XT). If Core is doing the correct thing, it shouldn't mind putting it to the market test more fully, by taking its finger off the scale.

How much is Core's finger really on the scale here? Well, for example, how many reasons are there to mistrust Mike Hearn? Some would say a lot. That means, as things stand now, even if you want BIP101, you can't really have it if you have a problem with Mike, because XT isn't an option for you. And because other people feel that way, you're further limited. The way Core (and XT) does it now makes it a power struggle, a popularity contest, and a package deal. Maybe Core could stall for a long time before people would finally give up and go with Mike. That's a lot of friction in the market.

And small block adherents, imagine the reverse, if it were Mike and Gavin were running Core and Pieter, Wlad, and Maxwell had broken off and started their own implementation, with maybe Jeff going between. And people were sticking with Core and its giant block plan, heading for catastrophe. You might notice the market friction then.

BU eliminates the power struggle by unbundling the setting of consensus parameters from the rest of the Code. It also of course makes for a lot more choices. If 1MB is too small and 8MB too big, what recourse is there? Roll your own and try to popularize it? Very hard. But propose 4MB and try to get people to agree? More doable. Or what if, like some Chinese miners were saying, 8MB is fine but the scaling to 8GB is ridiculous. What do you do? You have two options, and they are bundled up tightly with all the other aspects of the code and why you choose Core or XT. That's again a lot of market friction.

I'm not disagreeing with you necessarily about a users setting the parameters on their own nodes, but I don't see how this market mechanism works, nor do I see how you have "eliminated" a power struggle.

People will still struggle to influence the miners and users over what block size is being used. Developers will be under influence (internal and external) over what defaults to set (or are you going to remove defaults altogether and require end users to choose every possible parameter?).

Whatever the merits of the idea, I don't see how you have made these decisions into significantly more of a market process. As we have agreed, users could always modify the code or choose what code to use, so the market already existed. The politics will certainly still exist, and perhaps become even more intense (and potentially, expensive, which brings its own issues) with respect to trying to convince users and miners (and possibly developers, as to defaults).

Remove the hard code size limit? Okay, sure, maybe a good idea, maybe not. But beyond that you seem to be overselling the idea by a wide margin.