Quote from: Gavin Andresen on October 13, 2014, 07:05:00 PM

Quote from: NewLiberty on October 13, 2014, 05:17:44 PM

It also may be contrary to the eventual goal of usage driven mining, where transaction fees ultimately overtake block reward in value. This proposal may drive TX fees to zero forever. Block chain is a somewhat scarce resource, just as total # of coins. Adding an arbitrary 50% yearly inflation changes things detrimentally.

I'm sending a follow-up blog post to a couple of economists to review, to make sure my economic reasoning is correct, but I don't believe that even an infinite blocksize would drive fees to zero forever.

Commodity prices never drop to zero, no matter how abundant they are (assuming a reasonably free market-- government can, of course supply "free" goods, but the results are never pretty). The suppliers of the commodities have to make a profit, or they'll find something else to do.

That has very little to do with whether or not transaction fees will be enough to secure the network in the future. I think both the "DON'T RAISE BLOCKSIZE OR THE WORLD WILL END!" and "MUST RAISE THE BLOCKSIZE OR THE WORLD WILL END!" factions confuse those two issues.

Great, we agree on all of this.

Quote from: Gavin Andresen on October 13, 2014, 07:05:00 PM

I don't think adjusting the block size up or down or keeping it the same will have any effect on whether or not transaction fees will be enough to secure the network as the block subsidy goes to zero (and, as I said, I'll ask professional economists what they think).

Here is where it jumps the tracks.
Your thoughts, and my thoughts aren't going to answer this.
Math will. It is not about opinion, it is about measurement and calculation. Picking 50% out of a hat is hubris, and you know it in your heart.
Justify it, show your work, or it can not be taken seriously. Looking forward to your follow-up, and its analysis, economists sure, but lets have game theory analysis as well as an analysis of new risks.

Quote from: Gavin Andresen on October 13, 2014, 07:05:00 PM

Quote from: NewLiberty on October 13, 2014, 05:17:44 PM

If this forks as currently proposed, I'll be selling all my BTC on Gavin's fork and mining on the other. I suspect I will not be the only one.

Okey dokey. You can join the people still mining on we-prefer-50-BTC-per-block fork (if you can find them... I think they gave up really quickly after the 50 to 25 BTC subsidy decrease).

Strawmen, will make you look stupid and petty. Play well with the other scientists please? If this was your best and final offer, you needn't bother responding. I don't know the answer, but so far we haven't seen it in sufficient detail to end dialog and discovery.

Not to belabor it, but the obvious difference is the 50 BTC folks were going against Satoshi's design, whereas those following 50% love-it-or-leave-it fork would be going against Satoshi's design. If we need a hard fork, we do it right so that it need not be repeated.

Your proposal started a dialog that may bring a good result.
The first effort isn't that end result. If we think we got it perfect on a first guess, our minds are closed to learning and consensus.

No comment on this?

Quote

One example of a better way would be to use a sliding window of x number of blocks 100+ deep and basing max allowed size on some percentage over the average while dropping anomalous outliers from that calculation. Using some method that is sensitive to the reality as it may exist in the unpredictable future give some assurance that we won't just be changing this whenever circumstances change.
Do it right, do it once.

There isn't a way to predict what networks will look like in the future, other than to use the data of the future to do just that. Where we are guessing we ought acknowledge that.