Quote from: madjules007 on March 12, 2016, 02:25:57 AM

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

The limit was a temporary fix.

Shortly before disappearing, Satoshi also repeated over and over that there were more ways that Bitcoin could be successfully DOS attacked than he could count.

Well then, as he talked about "other ways" should we disregard this:

Quote from: satoshi on October 04, 2010, 07:48:40 PM

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

Also, while not conclusive at all, notice the hypothetical block number he used, and possibly why he didn't pull 1 million out of that hat.

Quote from: madjules007 on March 12, 2016, 02:25:57 AM

The limit (in conjunction with transaction fees) were intended as a DOS attack and spam deterrent. Do you have any evidence that those risks have been mitigated? Do you have any evidence that suggests that 2MB blocks won't be filled to capacity right away? That would leave us where we are today -- with no scaling solutions, wondering how much more un-optimized throughput the network can safely handle.

It's been somewhat mitigated, in the sense that back then, it cost exactly nothing to solve a block, or a trivial amount. Today it takes massive investment, located in massive farms, which are not incentivized to kill Bitcoin by DoSing it with malicious blocks, just for the lels. Blocks that the other miners might as well orphan(stale) anyway. The disagreement is about who determines what is spam. One group thinks it should be the miners deciding the block sizes they produce and the fees they require for admission. The other group thinks it should be an insular group of friends on irc, with a blatant COI.

Quote from: madjules007 on March 12, 2016, 02:25:57 AM

Quote from: satoshi on June 17, 2010, 06:46:08 PM

I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network.

Satoshi's description of how to increase the block size limit was also clearly in the context of a software update. Not an incompatible implementation of bitcoin that essentially attacks the network and intentionally forks from all other client nodes. He even thought compatible alternatives were a bad idea.

One could make the argument that Satoshi thought we could raise the limit as/when needed (as if we needed his authority anyway). In that respect, the question of necessity is subjective and debatable, and it is not immediately clear that an increase to 2MB now, with no attempts to make throughput more scalable is necessary.

One could not make the argument that Satoshi thought we should increase the block size limit through a contentious hard fork.

All of this is moot. We should be talking in terms of "what is best for bitcoin" -- with respect to users, nodes and miners -- not talking past each other with interpretations of things Satoshi said 5-6 years ago. Not only was Satoshi wrong about some things, but the state of bitcoin has changed a lot. Hell, if we left the codebase as he originally wrote it, those 184 billion bitcoins from the August 2010 value overflow incident would still be with us. Better to work towards bitcoin's principles than aimlessly trying to fit some arbitrary interpretation of Satoshi's words.

Which (possibly) makes you wonder if there is some reason it hasn't been released as a software update... Could there be anyone with their fingers on the central planning levers that might have a conflicted interest in a somewhat expensive main chain, via offering the medicine for that disease? Has an extremely well connected group taken $76 million of other peoples' money... to do exactly that?