{"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:Hey Matt,\n\nOK, let's get started ....\n\nHowever, there hasnt been any discussion on this\n\u003e mailing list in several years as far as I can tell.\n\u003e\n\nProbably because this list is not a good place for making progress or\nreaching decisions. Those are triggered by pull requests (sometimes).\n\nIf you're wondering \"why now\", that's probably my fault. A few days ago\nWladimir posted a release timeline. I observed to Wladimir and Gavin in\nprivate that this timeline meant a change to the block size was unlikely to\nget into 0.11, leaving only 0.12, which would give everyone only a few\nmonths to upgrade in order to fork the chain by the end of the winter\ngrowth season. That seemed tight.\n\nWladimir did not reply to this email, unfortunately. Perhaps he would like\nthe issue to go away. It won't - if Bitcoin continues on its current growth\ntrends it *will* run out of capacity, almost certainly by some time next\nyear.\n\nWhat we need to see right now is leadership and a plan, that fits in the\navailable time window.\n\n\n\u003e Certainly a consensus in this kind of technical community should be a\n\u003e basic requirement for any serious commitment to blocksize increase.\n\u003e\n\nI'm afraid I have come to disagree. I no longer believe this community can\nreach consensus on anything protocol related. Some of these arguments have\ndragged on for years. Consensus isn't even well defined - consensus of who?\nAnyone who shows up? And what happens when, inevitably, no consensus is\nreached? Stasis forever?\n\n\n\u003e Long-term incentive compatibility requires that there be some fee\n\u003e pressure, and that blocks be relatively consistently full or very nearly\n\u003e full.\n\n\nI disagree. When the money supply eventually dwindles I doubt it will be\nfee pressure that funds mining, but as that's a long time in the future,\nit's very hard to predict what might happen.\n\n\n\u003e What we see today are\n\u003e transactions enjoying next-block confirmations with nearly zero pressure\n\u003e to include any fee at all (though many do because it makes wallet code\n\u003e simpler).\n\u003e\n\nMany do because free transactions are broken - the relay limiter means\nwhether a free transaction actually makes it across the network or not is\nbasically pot luck and there's no way for a wallet to know, short of either\ntrying it or actually receiving every single transaction and repeating the\ncalculations. If free transactions weren't broken for all non-full nodes\nthey'd probably be used a lot more.\n\n\n\u003e This allows the well-funded Bitcoin ecosystem to continue building\n\u003e systems which rely on transactions moving quickly into blocks while\n\u003e pretending these systems scale.\n\n\nI have two huge problems with this line of thinking.\n\nFirstly, no, the \"Bitcoin ecosystem\" is not well funded. Blockstream might\nbe, but significant numbers of users are running programs developed by tiny\nstartups, or volunteers who don't have millions in venture capital to play\nwith.\n\nArm-twisting \"the ecosystem\" into developing complicated Rube Goldberg\nmachines in double quick time, just to keep the Bitcoin show on the road,\nis in fact the opposite of decentralisation - it will effectively exclude\nanyone who isn't able to raise large amounts of corporate funding from\nwriting code that uses the Bitcoin network. Decentralisation benefits from\nsimplicity, and bigger blocks are (in Gavin's words) \"the simplest thing\nthat will work\".\n\nMy second problem is the claim that everyone is playing pretend about\nBitcoin, except you guys. I would put it another way - I would say those\npeople are building products and getting users, by making reasonable\nengineering tradeoffs and using systems that work. Yes, one day those\nsystems might have to change. That's the nature of scaling. It's the nature\nof progress. But not today. Probably not tomorrow either.\n\nWhat I would like to see from Blockstream is a counter-proposal. So far you\nhave made lots of vague comments that we all agree with - yes,\ndecentralisation is good, yes some block size limit must exist, if only\nbecause computers are finite machines.\n\nWhat I don't see from you yet is a *specific and credible plan* that fits\nwithin the next 12 months and which allows Bitcoin to keep growing. Not\nsome vague handwave like \"let's all use the Lightning network\" (which does\nnot exist), or \"let's do more research\" (Gavin has done plenty of\nresearch), or \"but what about the risks\" (Bitcoin is full of risks). A\nplan, with dates attached, and a strong chance of actually being deployed\nin time.\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20150507/81942b17/attachment.html\u003e"}