Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Increasing the block size is a good idea; 50%/year is probably too aggressive
by
btchris
on 22/10/2014, 17:28:26 UTC
Please tell me if you agree an ossifying of the protocol - the fact it will become increasingly hard, probably impossible to make changes as adoption grows - is what we'll likely see.

Not that I was asked, but I'll offer an opinion anyways.

At worst harder, but not impossible.

Today we have a sort of self-enforced (by the core devs) consensus system, plus of course the ultimate ability to vote with your node and with your mining capacity. I wouldn't expect the latter to ever change (indeed some blocksize limit is required to maintain this goal). For the former, however, I doubt that having this little governance around important changes to Bitcoin will last forever -- 20 years hence I would expect a much more regimented procedure, somewhat more akin to a standards organization than what we have today (perhaps with a combination of academic, miner, and corporate interests represented, but that'd be an argument for a different thread).

More governance is both bad and good-- in particular on the good side, bright lines can be drawn when it comes to voting in a way that doesn't happen so much today. If the ISO can finally manage to crank out C++11, despite the contentious issues and compromises that were ultimately required (and C++14 just two months ago too!), pretty much anything is possible IMO.

If you're that worried about a ossification, perhaps you'd prefer a dead man's switch: in 20 years, the blocksize reverts to its current 1 MB.