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.
Then comment upon it now, for you are working on an erroneous understanding of my proposal and it's implications.
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.
That is a static view, and not one that is supportable. With each smaller increment, the percentage of marginal miners forced out would be smaller than otherwise, and thus the likelyhood that they would be able to return as both their own local infrastructure and the average infrastructure improves. The limits exist for several reasons, not the least of which is artificial scarcity, but we still have to balance the future against the present. Even without my proposed propagation rule, I'm pretty sure that the 250KB limit has never been broken to date. Why is that? Do you presume that it's only because there are not enough transactions to justify it to the miners? I would think that part of it is that the soft limit is an agreed upon rule, to be exceeded once that has been agreed upon also. My rule would only add a bit of risk to ignoring this rule that doesn't presently exist. I don't doubt that, eventually, some miners are going to test the soft limit. I want some of those tests to fail.
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...
That's conjecture. Show me
why you believe that this is so, not just your assumptions about what the future holds using overly simplified mental models. Thus far you have failed to present an argument for this perspective. I'm not even willing to claim that it's incorrect, only that it remains unsupported. Can you really not imagine any other incentives that would contradict the "logical conclusion" you have come to?I can think of at least three.
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.
Only someone who assumes that only a hard limit is actually the only limiting factor. Again, we've already bumped up against the 250KB soft limit on several occasions; and amazingly, none of the miners have chosen to comment out that line of code. Obviously there is some kind of cost to the miners for doing so, or a presumption of a cost, that would exceed the benefits to the miner for doing so. One such cost is simply the work involved in commenting out that line of code and recompiling their mining programs over a relatively few number of tiny transaction fees. That condition is bound to change, certainly. This does not mean that miners will start to ignore the soft limit. It is a community convention that, while not presently enforceble by the running protocol, is still enforceable by the community. If some miner actually did this prior to the community deciding to raise that soft limit, the offender would prompt some kind of response. What kind of response, I won't hazard a guess; but those miners certainly don't desire to prompt the community to include rules more strict than what I'm proposing. It's not in the interest of the miners to invoke a response.