whether our technological level has reached the point where we can
do it now without sacrificing current security. Obviously, 10 years from now, a 2-4
MB blocksize hardfork is extremely doable and should preserve the current security
As someone who "supports" segwit on it's merits, and a 2Mb block increase for compromise, I have yet to see any compelling argument for this. Can someone point me to something I can read and digest that would actually accomplish that plus something that refutes that. I'm not talking about things that are filled with propaganda and ideology but solid arguments based on technical issues and facts etc.
I think that before even be able to discuss that, the real question should be answered, without politics, but purely on rational, logical grounds:
"what is the real power of non-mining nodes ?"
My personal stance on this, which I think I have *rationally proved* but I'm open of course to any pointing out of an error in my proof, is that the answer to this is essentially "zilch".
I put some caveats on this, and I'm not saying that running a full node is *useless*, but:
1) only for its owner (knowledge of how bitcoin is actually working, deniability of IP address vs own transactions)
2) can help network if direct internet links between users and mining pool nodes are, for one or another reason, not functioning
3) serves as some "back up memory" if ever a big catastrophy eliminates all miner nodes, to be able to "start bitcoin up again".
But as "guardians of the protocol", their power is zilch, and hence as "decentralizing power element" their influence is zilch.
That's my position on this for the moment, not because of any politics, but because I think I established the proof of it rationally. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe someone can pinpoint where the proof goes wrong. I'm not going to repeat it, I've formulated it often.
Now, this question is important, because it is this aspect which makes people say that big blocks are "dangerous for centralisation". My idea is that before the size of the blocks becomes an issue, the REAL centralizing force, which is economics of scale in the PoW scheme, which separated bitcoin's system into a "provider and customer" model, had much, much more centralizing influence.
Indeed, any industrialized PoW transforms a crypto currency network in two separate entities:
a) a decentralized factory of block chain (the mining pools and their subcontractors, the mining hardware owners), that "produces block chain" and "sells coins on it"
b) users that use that block chain to do their transactions, and buy the coins of (a) for good money.
This is not the case for a PoS coin for instance, where there's an intimate link between coin *owners* and the produced ledger.
A PoW ledger is essentially a kind of "notary service" that is sold to people that want to "get data written down and published": this is the product that the decentralized miner industry sells, and they have their "privilege" by the hardware investment they made ; this is different from a PoS ledger, where the investment is in the system itself, and not externally, making the separation between "ledger provider" and "ledger user" impossible, as it happens on industrialized PoW ledgers.