Quote from: btcusury on March 10, 2016, 04:16:56 PM

Quote from: sgbett on March 10, 2016, 02:57:24 PM

Quote from: btcusury on March 10, 2016, 02:12:59 PM

Quote from: sgbett on March 08, 2016, 11:16:30 AM

Quote from: CIYAM on March 08, 2016, 08:29:00 AM

Quote from: sgbett on March 08, 2016, 08:24:59 AM

The elephant in the room just will not go away though. The limit was a temporary fix.

You do realise that a block as big as 64 MB will take a lot longer than 10 minutes to verify on anything but the most costly hardware?

(so if Satoshi had "got it right" with the original block size then Bitcoin wouldn't be able to even produce blocks as quickly as 10 minutes and no-one but corporations would be able to afford to even run full nodes - but hey who cares about inconvenient truths such as those)

Premise:
- 64MB blocks are allowed
- 64MB blocks take over 10 minutes to verify

Question:
What financial incentive exists for a miner to produce such a block?

That's not even really the appropriate question. The real question you should be asking is "What would prevent someone who wants to destroy the network from producing such a block?"

But you don't ask that because ... (you tell me).

I do not ask the question because, an attacker intending to destroy the network would not produce such a block, because such a block does not destroy the network.

Quote from: http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/resources/1txn.pdf

This transaction monopolization can only happen IF all the other mining pools choose to mine on top of that monopolizing mining pool's blocks. Yet, doing so will result in lower profitability for the other (the majority) of pools since they (having smaller validation capacity) must always mine 1-txn blocks and are therefore unable to reap transaction fees. This is an unstable situation - if a single mining pool chooses to ignore the large block and is able to find a small competing block while other pools are still validating a large block, it is in the other pools best interest to switch to this new sibling6. By switching, the other pools reduce the risk that they are mining on top of an invalid block, and can mine blocks with transactions. But if mining pools know that the majority will switch to a discovered sibling, it is rational for all pools except for the producer of the large block to search for a sibling rather than produce a 1-txn block.

Knowing that an expensive to validate block is mitigated as an attack vector, the question remains as to why somebody would produce such a block?

The implication being that if you have the money/hardware to produce blocks, your most profitable course of action is to just mine blocks honestly.

You are missing my point because you are assuming that the motivations of all participants is that of monetary profit. You can't just ignore the observation that decentralized cryptocurrency represents the only real threat to the central banksters in a very long time. The point is the same for 64MB as it is for 2MB, only more obvious in that the problems 64MB would create are much greater.

No such assumption was made. In the quoted text a method by which *other* miners who are motivated by money act to thwart this kind of attack by mining a smaller sibling block, building on that and ultimately orphaning the attacker's block.

There are simpler ways that a theoretical bad actor with no profit motivation and lots of money can destroy bitcoin. Setting up a mining operation to craft malicious expensive to validate blocks doesn't seem like a good angle to me!