Quote from: Meni Rosenfeld on March 01, 2013, 09:41:36 AM

Quote from: alexkravets on March 01, 2013, 09:19:12 AM

1. There is absolutely no observable convergence in endless discussions on increasing Bitcoin's max_blocksize over the years, assuming this convergence does not materialize ... Bitcoin will be limited to 7 TPS and tx fees will rise until small amounts are not sendable.

There was never a reason to; now that there is, some increase is likely to be agreed on. Anyway, increasing max_size is needed but isn't really the solution I have in mind.

Quote from: alexkravets on March 01, 2013, 09:19:12 AM

2. Bitcoin transactions can never be made secure without some confirmations by at least a few blocks, and block time gap variance is so high that two days ago I had to wait 65 minutes for a single block to come through.

Also solvable with the above.

Your proposal is certainly intersting and b/c I'm unfamiliar with its details I would have to study it to have an opinion, however since being posted last July 05 did any of it make it into any branches in bitcoin's github or was there any uptake on it ? I honestly don't know.

But this raises another related issue: After being in existence 4+ years and presumably having a whole ecosystem of companies and users around it, so far Bitcoin community has managed (maybe) to fund one full time developer (Gavin through Bitcoin Foundation).

Now compare that to 10+ (?) people (by now) furiously working for almost 2 years (my guess) on Ripple in stealth mode and furiously implementing the protocol and fixing bugs and doing multiple daily commits as their full time jobs.

Which source tree can sustain a higher rate of evolution Bitcoin or Ripple ? The question is obviously rhetorical, since the answer (Ripple) should be pretty obvious.

Bottom line, Bitcoin was the 1.0 version and a trail blazer and despite having a huge fan base around it and being in existence for 4+ years ... it has achieve limited penetration, but worse than that its rate of evolution shows no sign of ever being anything faster than the glacial rate it has been so far ... this is partly "tragedy of the commons" and partly because not even Satoshi could get all the initial parameters tuned just right AND leave some others tunable to allow the system to evolve gracefully.

In the long run, Ripple is simply a superior technology (assuming its foundational rigor holds up in independent peer-reviews !!!) AND its implementation is being done by a much larger professional team with full time jobs and not occasional pull requests submitted once in a while ...

I will take that despite the XRP 50% Fort Knox problem lurking around in the future because that problem is either theoretical (if the hoard is securely locked up and not flood-released OR self-defeating because as soon as it starts being used to cap or manipulate XRP market it will start melting away since the absolute upper bound of 100 XRPs still exists and you can only sell so many of them before you lose control of the market.

Cheers ...