Quote from: AlexGR on March 11, 2016, 09:35:57 PM

Quote from: inca on March 11, 2016, 09:28:15 PM

Quote from: AlexGR on March 11, 2016, 09:19:10 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on March 11, 2016, 08:40:58 PM

I doubt anyone is suggesting small blocks forever, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence of an emergency need to take some kind of drastic measures to increase the blocksize limit on an emergency basis.. and in that regard, the impression and/or creation of an emergency seems to be largely fabricated with a bunch of loud and whiny voices.

I think it was something like a year ago when Hearn predicted that urgent action must be taken or Bitcoin would ...crash. Yes, he said crash. The rationale was something like "ohh nodes will fill their mempools and nodes will start crashing and ohhhh, we need bigger blocks".

For a programmer it's very suspect why he didn't simply write a patch and say "here guys, this will fix nodes from crashing through a parameter that sets mempool size"... Why promote a hard fork for 8-20mb increases (which would be 20-50 times the legit activity of the network) instead of simply patching the software with a mempool limit, as 0.12 does?

The whole crisis / urgency scenario was bullshit, as was the "problem=>reaction=>solution" - in terms of ...proposed "solution".

For some reason your answer entirely misses the fact that blocks are filling up. A cheap transaction flooding attack brought the network to it's knees just last week.

You are that dog cartoon saying 'everything is fine' as the house burns down around you.

"We can't have 1mbforevah"
"We want 1cent-txsforevah" (and if we get to 2 cents we say the network is down to its knees because we didn't pay the 2-3-5 cent fee)

Newsflash: The system is not based on the premise of 1 cent txs forevah.

Fees are dynamic, based on the load. You don't pay the fees => you get in line. And wait.

The network operates normally for those that follow proper tx pricing. If they don't, it's usually because their wallet makes wrong assumptions about fees. They should upgrade to core 0.12. But then they'd have to download 10gb txs and 60gb spam... ooops.

In a world where incoming transactions over 24 hours is less than blockspace that is fine - mild irritation to a few bitcoin users. Even as we are now with occasional surges of activity where transaction volumes fill the mempool leading to transaction delays it resolves soon enough as the backlog clears - with lots of complaints of a temporary nature.

The actual problem comes next if transactions continue to ramp up as they have progressively leading to a backlog which never clears. Then it doesn't matter what price your wallet chooses, it will not guarantee inclusion by a miner, as the next person putting a transaction in will out bid you (yay fee market!).

Being economically naive you would hurrah! at a working fee market. But actually by enforcing limited transactional scarcity with a blocksize cap what you actually do is break bitcoin for most people. Suddenly stuck transactions are widespread and sure you can still use bitcoin but fees will simply spiral upwards until they are ridiculous.

The best bit is that as the network becomes increasingly congested actually performing a flooding attack to completely disrupt the network becomes trivially cheap to employ.