Quote from: NewLiberty on October 17, 2014, 02:16:06 AM

Quote from: acoindr on October 17, 2014, 01:14:14 AM

Quote from: NewLiberty on October 16, 2014, 09:29:38 PM

Sure, we were also able to get x.25 and x.75 telecom to run over barbed wire, in the lab. (There are places in the world that still use these protocols, some of which would deeply benefit from bitcoin in their area.)
The logistical challenges of implementation is not what you find in the lab.
This stuff has to go out in environments where someone backs up their truck into a cross country line so they can cut it and drive off with a few miles of copper to sell as scrap. We live in the world, not in the lab.

We're in luck then, because one advantage of fiber lines over copper is they're not good used for anything other than telecom

I'm no telecommunications specialist, but do have an electronics engineering background. Raise some issue with fundamental wave transmission and maybe I can weigh in. My understanding is it's easier to install fiber lines, for example, because there is no concern over electromagnetic interference. Indeed, the fiber lines I witnessed being installed a week ago were being strung right from power poles.

However, is such theoretical discussion even necessary? We have people being offered 2Gbps bandwidth over fiber not in theory but in practice in Japan, today.

That's already orders of magnitude over our starting bandwidth numbers. I agree with Gavin that demand for more bandwidth is inevitable. It's obvious all networks are converging - telephone, television, radio, internet. We'll eventually send all our data over the internet, as we largely do now, but in ever increasing bandwidth usage. To imagine progress in technology will somehow stop for no apparent reason, when history is chock full of people underestimating what technological capacity we actually experience is not only shortsighted, it borders unbelievable.

Perhaps few disagree that Bitcoin can be improved by a plan for block size maximum adjustment. My issues with the proposals are less what it achieves (a good thing) but what it doesn't (preventing this from happening in the future).

There are myriad external realities that we can not know about. The development of the telecom technology is perhaps less the issue than what the world has in store for us in the coming decades. I don't know, and no one else does either, but that shouldn't stop us from striving to achieve what has not been done before.

Undersea cables are cut accidentally, and by hostile actions, economic meltdowns and military conflicts halt or destroy deployments, plagues, natural disasters etc, OR new developments can accelerate everything, robots might do this all for us. We can't know by guessing today what the right numbers will be. We could be high or low. I am just hoping that some more serious thought goes into avoiding the need to guess or extrapolate (an educated guess but still a guess). We do not have a crisis today other than some pending narrow business concerns (some of which are on the board of TBF and possibly suggested that Gavin "do something"). I am also thankful that he is doing so. This is an effort that deserves attention (even with the other mitigating efforts already in development). Gavin is a forward thinking man, and is serving his role well. We should be all glad that he is not alone in this, and that no one person has the power to make such decisions arbitrarily for others.

The difficulty adjustment algorithm works without knowing the future. We should similarly look for a way that can also work for many generations, come what may, and save Bitcoin from as many future hard forks as we can.

This is our duty, to our future, by virtue of us being here at this time.

Decreasing the block limit (note, not required block size) in the future would not be a hard fork, it would be a soft fork.