I fully agree with this.


Peter, I've struggled to try to understand you concerns but I still find your arguments convoluted and hard to follow. You want it to be possible to run a Bitcoin node on average hardware, but you don't want the people with average hardware to be able to use the network. How can that work? It's obvious that a blockchain recording all transactions is bound to be resource-intensive, but as far as I can see that's the very nature of a proof-of-work blockchain. Satoshi's idea was that such a resource-intensive system could be viable in the 21st century and he always presented Bitcoin as an accessible payment system, not as some sort of infrastructure for large financial services. And that idea is also what practically all of Bitcoin enthusiasts have been promoting during the last three years. I think I'm not the only one who's been telling his friends about how easy it is to get a Bitcoin wallet, and make payments to anyone around the world, and how this system could eventually be used to pay for a restaurant bill or to buy a book online. This is probably the idea that first attracted most of us to Bitcoin. If you think that such a thing is not possible and that Bitcoin can only survive as a low-volume network where payments are outrageosly expensive, well then that's like saying that you don't really believe in the original Bitcoin idea. You could be right, who knows, but keeping the block size limit is what effectively kills the Bitcoin dream, either by turning it into a specialist service used by a minority or, more likely, condemning it to irrelevance and oblivion. We need to find a compromise, and I think the sensible thing would be to agree to a higher block size limit. Those, like myself, who would remove the limit altogether will find a much higher limit more reasonable whereas those who are adamant that the limit is necessary could accept a value like 50 MB, and avoid crippling the system during the next few years.