Quote from: justusranvier on June 03, 2013, 06:12:13 PM

You win the Orwellian of the day award for having successfully used every term you included in that rant as if it meant the opposite of its meaning.

What I want is for the network to be allowed to provide a service at a quantity and price that they and their customers find acceptable. You want to ration the amount of transaction processing miners are allowed to provide to their customers.

The fact that we don't know how much it costs to process a transaction is expected and irrelevant. Miners won't continue to mine if the benefit the receive does not exceed the costs involved, and users will not send transactions if the cost of doing so exceeds the benefit they derive. That's that that matters. If you don't believe this process works in the real world then you should really contemplate how it's possible for the providers of the products and services you consume every day to figure out the correct amount to produce and the correct price to offer it at.

There is always rationing. The question is how.

In a mature system with a market, I'd let the market figure it out. That's what market are for, and that's what markets do.

But we don't have a mature system, and we don't have a market. Not only do we not know what a transaction really costs, we don't have any way to find out. You are arguing as if I didn't believe in markets. I do, but I only believe in real markets. I have absolutely zero faith in the ability of a market that does not and can not exist to provide useful information.

In the absence of useful information, it is prudent to be careful. Since backpressure on the transaction volume does not reasonably exist yet, and whatever actions we take will have serious long term consequences for the entire world, we should not just remove the limit, nor create dynamic rules that are too easy.

When we do need to increase the limit, I would propose the following rules: Block max size increases iff at the time of difficulty change, the sum of the size of the last 2016 blocks is > (1814 * block_max_size). If size increase is indicated, block_max_size+=(block_max_size>>4). I'll leave the implications as an exercise for the reader. 1814 and 4 are magic numbers, they could be changed, but I suggest they not be any smaller than specified.