Quote from: piotr_n on June 04, 2013, 01:39:18 PM

Nothing has been consulted with a community - Gavin jumps into the thread with an announcement "The block size will be raised" because "that is the overwhelming consensus among the people who are actually writing code and using Bitcoin for products and services that it needs to happen."
What the hell?

Are we supposed to just believe that whoever he talked to in San Jose was a good statistical representation of the worldwide bitcoin community and so the bitcoin community surely wants him to lift the limit from the protocol, ASAP?

The wording "using Bitcoin for products and services" is very specific. As Peter pointed out earlier the fact that transactions currency cost $12 each shows very clearly that the market does not think Bitcoin as a payment service is valuable now, but instead either thinks it will be in the future, and/or sees Bitcoin as valuable as a pure investment.

"Actually writing code" is misleading. The core developers other than Gavin have a consensus that while the blocksize may be raised in the future decentralization is important and raising the blocksize must be balanced against that concern. Unfortunately for the payment side of Bitcoin that consensus also is that off-chain transactions will be required for low-value payments and you can see that consensus in action by how the developers decided to block microtransactions from Bitcoin on the basis that they weren't valuable enough for the resources they use. The question is how low is too low? No-one knows what that answer will be because as long as payments happen on a decentralized consensus system the cost of a transaction depends on how popular Bitcoin becomes. Put another way, O(n^2) scaling is a bitch.

A more interesting question is to ask why doesn't the foundation ever talk about off-chain transactions? My guess is they know that FinCEN has them in a nasty bind now that they've made it clear that Bitcoin is ok provided you use it exactly the way they want you to: as an easily traceable blockchain-only payment method. Promoting alternatives would raise ugly issues around money laundering and so on. Right now if someone went off and implemented one of Peter's anonymous chaum-token using fidelity bonded banks it would most likely be used not as a payment system, but as a way to launder money.

Yet it would also provide an answer to the scalability issue, just not one the Foundation can back, and probably not a solution that the Foundation's publicly visible and mostly US-based members can use to accept payments anyway regardless of how well it works. That gets back to the issue of his repeated thunderous public statements of course. What do they do? They discourage anyone from working on alternatives. If they don't exist, people won't have any option but to raise the blocksize.

The worst scenario for the Foundation is if off-chain transactions are developed to the point where they are a secure and usable way of moving funds, yet the legal situation in the US doesn't change or gets worse. The rest of the world could easily choose to leave the blocksize as it is, gradually pricing companies who must follow strict anti-money-laundering laws out of Bitcoin entirely.

As for you Peter, and indeed anyone else who cares about Bitcoin's future, don't let yourself get distracted by forums. Your efforts to make the problems Bitcoin has as a payment system clear, like the replace-by-fee project and making mining more decentralized with pooled-solo mode, are good and you should keep them up. Writing code and non-forum PR is a far more valuable use of your time than chatting to angry internet trolls like ShadowOfHarbringer and Gavin.

edit: Speaking of, I agree with that anonymous timestamper. You should be encouraging UTXO timestamping and other abusive uses of Bitcoin that we know threaten Bitcoin in the future now, precisely to make the risk clear. With Bitcoin it's not unlike security disclosure, where not disclosing the security risks puts us in much greater harm in the future. Gregory Maxwell's concept of our "startup capital" has value, but at the same time we should get a sense now of how valuable people see abusive use when we know we have no way of stopping them in the future other than by making the use expensive. So yes, turn off your timestamping servers until someone is willing to pay you properly to run them.

edit #2: Note how I'm not saying that the foundation is trying to get Bitcoin under FinCEN/US government control, just that they are taking a perfect rational approach towards promoting the blockchain as the solution to all payments given the limitations public companies in the US face.