Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: The MAX_BLOCK_SIZE fork
by
Jeweller
on 31/01/2013, 12:13:41 UTC
caveden - Thanks for the link to the thread from 2010.  It's interesting that many people, including Satoshi, were discussing this long before the limit was approached.  And I definitely agree that having it hard-coded in will make it much harder to change in 2014 than in 2010.

da2ce7 - I understand your opposition to any protocol change.  Makes sense; we signed up for 1MB blocks, so that's what we stay with.  What I'd like to know is, what would your response be if there was a widespread protocol change?  If version 0.9 of the qt-client had some type of increased, or floating max block size (presumably with something like solex proposes), would you:

- refuse the change and go with a small-block client
- grudgingly accept it and upgrade to a big-block client
- give up on bitcoin all together?

I worry about this scenario from a store-of-value point of view.  Bitcoins are worth something because of the decentralized consensus of the block chain.  To me, anything that threatens that consensus threatens the value of my bitcoins.  So in my case, whether I'm on the big-block side or the small-block side, I'm actually just going to side with whichever side is bigger, because I feel the maintenance of consensus is more valuable than any benefits / problems based on the details of the protocol.  Saying you reject it on "moral" terms though makes me think you might not be willing to make that kind of pragmatic compromise.

That said, 1MB is really small.  I'm trying to envision a world-finance-dominating network with 1MB blocks every 10 minutes and it's tough.  While there are lots of great ideas, it does seem to defeat the purpose a little bit to have the vast majority of transactions taking place outside the blockchain. 
And if the 1MB limit does stay, it calls in to question the need for client improvements in terms efficiency and so on.  If the blocks never get appreciably bigger than they do now, well any half-decent laptop made in the past few years can handle being a full node with no problem.

Perhaps a better question then I'd like to ask people here is: The year is 2015.  Every block is a megabyte.  Someone wrote a new big-block client fork, and people are switching.  What will you do?