Quote from: rebuilder on January 30, 2016, 05:45:38 PM

Quote from: AlexGR on January 30, 2016, 05:22:51 PM

Quote from: rebuilder on January 30, 2016, 07:26:34 AM

I'm confused. I thought you previously argued for small blocks and not worrying about scaling so much?

I'm in favor of the rational use of the blockchain, not necessarily pro-small blocks or big blocks. You can say I'm against block abuse. I wouldn't mind bigger blocks accompanied with a mandatory fee increase to prevent abuse and keep blockchain activity for transactions, instead of spamming or third-party storage.
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By the time the subsidy goes down significantly (let's say the halving down to 900 or 450 BTC - which are 2-3 halvings ahead), 2 things will have happened

1) Higher tx capabilities - perhaps 10-20-50x or more, whether directly or with sidechains
2) Much higher BTC price to compensate for subsidy losses. As inflation lowers, BTC becomes stronger price-wise, thus mining 3600 BTCs at 400$ would give the miners less than say mining 900 BTCs at 10.000$.

I don't have time to for a proper reply right now, so I'll just settle for two points :
-If the miners decide transactions you call abuse make sense for them to include in blocks, why does this bother you?

There are a lot of reasons why this isn't ideal both in terms of blockchain abuse and politics. For example you have all the political pressure going on with "ohhh fullblockalypse" when the blocks are getting filled with crap and some people want to perform a power grab based on a perceived "problem".

Spam fills blocks => a "savior" comes along and says the solution is to increase block size to fill blocks with more spam under the pretext of scaling txs => you have both a power grab and more inefficiency to deal with.

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-of your numbered points, #2 is obviously wrong. Security in this context is measured as cost to attack vs. potential profit, yes? It follows that as BTC valuation, and therefore the value stored on the network, goes up, you must correspondingly increase spending, in fiat terms, on mining to maintain the same level of security. By this view, it's the BTC cost of mining that is relevant.

I was just responding to the $$$/tx part, not trying to do a broader security analysis of incentives and disincentives, mining costs etc.