{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgyd","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgyd","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2015-05-07\n📝 Original message:\u003e\n\u003e Can you please elaborate on what terrible things will happen if we\n\u003e don't increase the block size by winter this year?\n\u003e\n\nI was referring to winter next year. 0.12 isn't scheduled until the end of\nthe year, according to Wladimir. I explained where this figure comes from\nin this article:\n\nhttps://medium.com/@octskyward/bitcoin-s-seasonal-affective-disorder-35733bab760d\n\nIt's a fairly simple estimate based on previous growth patterns.\n\nBecause I love wild guesses and mine is that full 1 MB blocks will not\n\u003e happen until June 2017.\n\u003e\n\nOK, it could be. But do you think this debate will play out significantly\ndifferently if you are right, I am wrong, and we have this discussion next\nsummer instead? Because in several years of watching these debates, I\nhaven't seen much change in them.\n\n\n\u003e We've successfully reached consensus for several softfork proposals\n\u003e already.\n\u003e\n\nAre you sure about that?\n\nWhat if Gavin popped up right now and said he disagreed with every current\nproposal, he disagreed with side chains too, and there would be no\nconsensus on any of them until the block size limit was raised.\n\nWould you say, oh, OK, guess that's it then. There's no consensus so might\nas well scrap all those proposals, as they'll never happen anyway. Bye bye\nside chains whitepaper.\n\n\n\n\u003e I just hope that by  \"What we need to see right now is leadership\" you\n\u003e don't mean something like \"when Gaving and Mike agree it's enough to\n\u003e deploy a hardfork\" when you go from vague to concrete.\n\u003e\n\nNo. What I meant is that someone (theoretically Wladimir) needs to make a\nclear decision. If that decision is \"Bitcoin Core will wait and watch the\nfireworks when blocks get full\", that would be showing leadership .....\nalbeit I believe in the wrong direction. It would, however, let people know\nwhat's what and let them start to make longer term plans.\n\nThis dillydallying around is an issue - people just make vague points that\ncan't really be disagreed with (more nodes would be nice, smaller pools\nwould also be nice etc), and nothing gets done.\n\n\n\u003e \"no bitcoin long term it's broken long term but that's far away in the\n\u003e future so let's just worry about the present\".\n\u003e\n\nI never said Bitcoin is broken in the long term. Far from it - I laid out\nmy ideas for what will happen when the block subsidy dwindles years ago.\n\nBut yes, it's hard for me to care overly much about what happens 30 years\nfrom now, for the same reason you probably care more about what happens\ntomorrow than what happens after you are dead. The further into the future\nyou try and plan, the less likely your plans are to survive unscathed.\n\n\n\u003e What you want to avoid at all cost (the block size actually being\n\u003e used), I see as the best opportunity we have to look into the future.\n\u003e\n\nI think I see one of the causes of disagreement now.\n\nI will write more on the topic of what will happen if we hit the block size\nlimit soon, maybe this evening. I have some other tasks to do first.\n\nRegardless, I don't believe we will get any useful data out of such an\nevent. I've seen distributed systems run out of capacity before. What will\nhappen instead is technological failure followed by rapid user abandonment\nthat pushes traffic back below the pressure threshold .... and those users\nwill most likely not come back any time soon.\n\n\n\u003e Ok, this is my plan: we wait 12 months, hope that your estimations are\n\u003e correct (in case that my guess was better than yours, we keep waiting\n\u003e until June 2017) and start having full blocks and people having to\n\u003e wait 2 blocks for their transactions to be confirmed some times.\n\u003e\n\nI disagree that'd be the outcome, but good, this is progress. Now we need\nto hear something like that from Wladimir, or whoever has the final say\naround here.\n\nWith respect to the fee market: I think it's fairer to say Gavin wants a\nmarket to exist, and he also wants supply to be plentiful. 20mb limit\ndoesn't actually mean every block will be 20mb the day after, no more than\nthey're all 1mb today. Miners may discover that if they go beyond 5mb they\nhave too many orphans and then propagation speed will have to be optimised\nto break through the next bottleneck. Scaling is always about finding the\nnext bottleneck and removing it, ideally, before you hit it.\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20150507/c1f84cb2/attachment.html\u003e"}