Once ASIC production gets down pat, churning out chips whose research and setup costs have long been covered, and so many are in use that they are only borderline profitable and even then maybe only in places where electricity is dirt cheap and/or the heat produced is needed or recycled back into more electricity what level of difficulty will be be looking at?

A megabyte per decimal-digit of difficulty would already be seven megabytes right now, since difficulty hit 1,000,000. I am not sure offhand how many leading zeroes that is in the binary version that is actually used by the code.

But fundamentally we just cannot really know what the future needs will look like, which is why I still favour going through this whole should we shouldn't we and the whole is everyone on board for this hard-fork process each time it starts to seem to some as if the limit does need to be raised.

How long is that process likely to take? We seem to have oodles of spare space currently, if we take our time about maybe adding a whole 'nother megabyte we still might find we have more than enough space by the time it even comes into effect.

I have even read here and there claims it is mostly Satoshi Dice that has made block sizes climb enough to notice much, if that is so I'd say we should correct the failure to discourage such frivolous waste first before considering increasing the block size.

Since I last wrote, bitcoin price has risen significantly again, so it is clearer by the hour that the block size limit is not discouraging use / driving away adoption enough to hit us in the pocketbooks, if at all. Maybe the people inventing in the dram of $10,000 per bitcoin actually like the idea that transaction fees will be high enough to ensure each and every one of their coins is safer than houses.


-MarkM-