Ninjastic
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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: The MAX_BLOCK_SIZE fork
by
mp420
on 02/02/2013, 17:06:30 UTC
Quote from: da2ce7 on February 02, 2013, 01:46:32 PM
Quote from: mp420 on February 02, 2013, 10:23:54 AM
Quote from: da2ce7 on February 01, 2013, 12:05:26 AM

In 10-years, a modern smartphone/computer will be able to run the full processing node if the Max_Block_Size remains 1MB.  This is a clear economic benefit for Bitcoin: Decentralized Bitcoin verification.  In fact in a few years, virtually every computer will be able to process the entire blockchain without issue thus making Bitcoin extremely unique in the realm of payments.

What is the use of having portable devices act as full nodes if you can't (because of fees) use bitcoin for purchasing anything smaller than a house? As I see it, your argument is not valid. With 1MB blocksize limit, even if Bitcoin remains a relatively small niche currency, the limit will act as a hard constraint on the potential utility of the currency. Of course, once we start hitting the limit, it will hurt Bitcoin's public image so much that it's conceivable so many people will move away from Bitcoin that we get few more years of time to fix the issue.

Lets not get ahead of ourselves here.  I expect that we will have a multi-layered system the vast majority of the transactions being made off-chain.

So, full nodes act as banks and issue Bitcoin-denominated instruments to their clients. Maybe the clients do not even have to trust the banks, thanks to some kind of cryptographical magic. Because of the economical scale of the transactions, only big companies and financial institutions have any reason to actually make a Bitcoin transaction, and these kinds of actors can run any kind of full node anyway. The clients can run something similar to what is outlined in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=88208.0

Actually, that thread outlines the way that future PCs (if not smartphones) could conceivably run a full node (or "almost-full" node) even with no limit / floating limit.

I just can't see why this artificial limit that was intended as temporary from the start should be accepted as an immutable part of the protocol.

There is going to be a hard fork in any case, more likely sooner than later. It should be planned beforehand, if we care about Bitcoin at all.