Quote from: brg444 on January 05, 2016, 01:10:34 AM

Quote from: LovelyDay on January 05, 2016, 12:16:08 AM

This bitcoin-dev post from 2012 by Stefan Thomas explains the philosophy behind BU exceptionally well:

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2012-June/001551.html

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The real limits are the bandwidth, computing and memory resources of participating nodes. For the sake of argument suppose a 1 TB block was released into the network right now and we'll also assume there was no block size limit of any kind. Many nodes would likely not be able to successfully download this block in under 10-30 minutes, so there is a very good chance that other miners will have generated two blocks before this block makes its way to them.

What does this mean? The miner generating a 1 TB block knows this would happen. So in terms of economic self interest he will generate the largest possible block that he is still confident that other miners will accept and process. A miner who receives a block will also consider whether to build on it based on whether they think other miners will be able to download it. In other words, if I receive a large block I may decide not to mine on it, because I believe that the majority of mining power will not mine on it - because it is either too large for them to download or because their rules against large blocks reject it.

It seems the idea was not really explored further until now.

The counter-argument given by GMaxwell in that thread?

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By itself letting the size float has non-trivial existential risk. A Bitcoin with expensive transactions due to competition for space in blocks can be front-ended with fast payment systems and still provide the promised decentralized currency. Bitcoin with a very large blockchain and blocks does not.

Funny that would be at the top of his mind.

Quite the foresight by good ol gmax.

The real question is where did Blockstream find a time machine to go back and bribe him then?