The soft limit is a voluntary limit at present, but there are things that can be done to disincentive miners from attempting to break that limit when it suits them.
Why on earth would we want to discourage miners from breaking the soft limit?
The soft limit was intended to be broken! I'll repeat that...
it is intended that eventually miners will remove the soft limit. I explained the reasoning behind the soft limit in
this post (anyone feel free to correct me if I got it wrong).
Did you not understand what I was trying to communicate concerning adding a 'soft limit' propagation rule to the clients?
Yeah I understood it. It was based on an erroneous understanding of the soft limit and its intention. And, it does nothing to improve the current situation. So I did not comment on it.
Well then, the way that he is presenting it becomes a strawman argument. Could you show me why this is inevitable? Are there really no other factors? Does an increase in resource demands not also incentivize the bandwidth starved mining operation to invest in better infrastructure?
Now you're saying exactly what he was saying. That Bitcoin mining and validation should have ever increasing minimum requirements of bandwidth, CPU, and storage. Every time the requirements are jacked up, it will put Bitcoin out of reach for some fraction of miners. Sure, some miners will remain (those who have the capital to invest in new equipment). But at each increase, there will be fewer miners. Continuing to its logical conclusion, mining will be an activity performed only by large entities with the capital necessary for the big up-front investment in equipment (data center, dedicated fiber line, server farms). That's
exactly the example he was making with Google, et. al. being the sole providers.
Certainly I will no longer be able to mine with my one Jalapeno (if it ever ships). The idea of hundreds of thousands of individuals solo mining with their commodity ASICs (like the Jalapeno) will go down the drain. Which
he also pointed out in his post:
Lets think for a moment of all those Jalapinos that once upon a time sounded like they could decentralise hashing power into every home...
Someone suggested a "really high limit" for the block size of one gigabyte. Now we know that would require dedicated bandwidth of 1.7Gbps (yeah that's right, giga). This doesn't sound practical at all, and I cannot take anyone seriously who would give this a shred of legitimacy.