Quote from: justusranvier on February 22, 2013, 01:47:25 AM

Given the pace of news stories regarding more businesses accepting bitcoin payments, and new exchanges and payment processors popping up around the world I'd be very surprised if we don't hit the hard limit before the end of the year.

And if that does happen, at that predicted time, the developers will have a much better idea of exactly how much to raise the hard limit by then, so setting the actual value of the #define can be a last moment thing just before they all compile the upgrade that fixes it.

Right now we don't even know whether it even will hit that limit that soon, and the soft limits make it pretty much impossible (more transaction fees than there are bitcoins to pay them with, I was told) to actually hit the hard limit.

(Admittedly, commenting out the soft limits would be a cheaper method of reaching the hard limit, but what percent of hashing power has done that so far? At what rate is how much hashing power doing it? By the end of the year how much percent of hasing power will have done it?)

Now don't panic about that "#define at the last moment" bit, I am thinking in terms of Gavin having obtained from us all by then a range of values and possibly a range of network conditions affecting the decision as to the final number to plug in, not that he will by fiat pull a whole different new number out of his ass that hadn't even come up in the discussions carried out between now and the end of the year*.

* "end of the year": an alias for "the time the fix is compiled for release"..

-MarkM-