Quote from: Rampion on February 21, 2013, 09:30:09 PM

Quote from: johnyj on February 21, 2013, 04:43:24 PM

Some of my view:

Actually many people here are just hoarding coins, there are not really a lot of transactions happening everyday, especially miners who connected to a pool. If we remove satoshi-dice, I think at least in the latest 2 years it will still work fine. Satoshi-dice is just an execellent example of no matter how big the block size is, there will be applications flood that space with meaningless transactions

And now imagine Satoshi-dice translated in 100 languages and used daily by 100 million people. And now imagine imagine another 100 Satoshi-dice type of service. That's going to be a problem, no matter how big the block size is.

Huh. I think this just nailed it for me.

The blocks will fill up, whatever size they are. This is simply human nature's approach to computing technology. Rewriting the rules to expand the size in the hopes of mitigating that is a task that will never end; there will be new calls for a larger block size every year, and before we know it, we'll be outpacing Moore's Law and slowly turning the blockchain into an unusable artifact.

Fortunately, Bitcoin already has a built-in mechanism to counteract overcrowded blocks: transaction fees.

When the blocks do start becoming consistently full, it'll be the ones with the highest priority (as in, smallest size and largest transaction fee) that get first priority, as it should be. If this means that SatoshiDice can't compete, and has to quit since it can't send tons of transactions for little to no fee any longer, why in the world should I or anyone else (except the owner of SatoshiDice... sorry bud, but you should have seen this coming) shed a tear over it? Pushing for a core rule change to Bitcoin to accommodate one current, and multiple future companies that want to fill blocks with their own transactions and not pay for doing so strikes me as just a bad idea.

So does that mean there should never be a block size increase? I'm going to say yes, there should not be one. Maybe it was originally intended, but I don't think it's necessary, and really, it's a pointless endeavor, if allowing "enough" transactions is the goal. (If instead the goal is a set, ideal number of transactions per second, say to match PayPal, and it's intended to be the only increase ever, I'd be more sympathetic... but I doubt that'll ever be the proposal.)

That's not to say that there shouldn't be some way to allow more, smaller-value transactions to flow. It's been pretty clear for a while now (to me, anyway) that Bitcoin needs a silver to its gold. We need a second cryptocurrency--one with larger blocks; smaller, simpler transactions, possibly doing away with scripting and only allowing simple spends; faster difficulty adjustments; a less-demanding full node; and somewhat faster confirmation times.

Quote from: crazy_rabbit on February 23, 2013, 09:55:16 AM

There actually already is another chain that could be perfect for running as a parallel chain- Terracoin. It's been around a few months and is pretty much a straight copy of bitcoin, with shorter block times (2 minutes), faster diff retarget, lower reward that halves every 4 years (20TRC per block). It's updated by adding the new patches for bitcoin, so it keeps the same consistency with bitcoin as well in terms of security and reliability. The address format is even the same- so there is no need to migrate addresses, your Private key for bitcoin yields the same private key for Terracoin. Although at first some people thought this would lead to confusion, the result has been the opposite. One Public key works for both TRC and BTC, making it very convenient.

The chain is young enough that an increased block size could probably be implemented without much trouble, or so many users to disturb. There is even talk about having it merge-mined to boost its security.

Currently it's traded at Vircurex, Bitparking and Zaptos exchanges. There are several Satoshi Dice like sites, and even an 'instawallet' that is in beta development. It has it's own forums as well: www.terracointalk.org (because the alt-forum is a bit of a cesspool).

Perhaps terracoin would be fertile soil to test some of these ideas? The user base is very open to testing new ideas.

Hmm. Worth looking into.