{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub1fx98zxt3lzspjs5f4msr0fxysx5euucm29ghysryju7vpc9j0jzqtcl2d8","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub1fx98zxt3lzspjs5f4msr0fxysx5euucm29ghysryju7vpc9j0jzqtcl2d8","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2015-05-07\n📝 Original message:On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Mike Hearn \u003cmike at plan99.net\u003e wrote:\n\u003e I observed to Wladimir and Gavin in private that this timeline meant a change to the block size was unlikely to get into 0.11, leaving only 0.12, which would give everyone only a few months to upgrade in order to fork the chain by the end of the winter growth season. That seemed tight.\n\nCan you please elaborate on what terrible things will happen if we\ndon't increase the block size by winter this year?\nI assume that you are expecting full blocks by then, have you used any\nstatistical technique to come up with that date or is it just your\nguess?\nBecause I love wild guesses and mine is that full 1 MB blocks will not\nhappen until June 2017.\n\n\u003e What we need to see right now is leadership and a plan, that fits in the\n\u003e available time window.\n\u003e\n\u003e\u003e\n\u003e\u003e Certainly a consensus in this kind of technical community should be a\n\u003e\u003e basic requirement for any serious commitment to blocksize increase.\n\u003e\n\u003e\n\u003e I'm afraid I have come to disagree. I no longer believe this community can\n\u003e reach consensus on anything protocol related. Some of these arguments have\n\u003e dragged on for years. Consensus isn't even well defined - consensus of who?\n\u003e Anyone who shows up? And what happens when, inevitably, no consensus is\n\u003e reached? Stasis forever?\n\nWe've successfully reached consensus for several softfork proposals already.\nI agree with others that hardfork need to be uncontroversial and there\nshould be consensus about them.\nIf you have other ideas for the criteria for hardfork deployment all I'm ears.\nI just hope that by  \"What we need to see right now is leadership\" you\ndon't mean something like \"when Gaving and Mike agree it's enough to\ndeploy a hardfork\" when you go from vague to concrete.\n\n\n\u003e\u003e Long-term incentive compatibility requires that there be some fee\n\u003e\u003e pressure, and that blocks be relatively consistently full or very nearly\n\u003e\u003e full.\n\u003e\n\u003e\n\u003e I disagree. When the money supply eventually dwindles I doubt it will be fee\n\u003e pressure that funds mining, but as that's a long time in the future, it's\n\u003e very hard to predict what might happen.\n\nOh, so your answer to \"bitcoin will eventually need to live on fees\nand we would like to know more about how it will look like then\" it's\n\"no bitcoin long term it's broken long term but that's far away in the\nfuture so let's just worry about the present\".\nI agree that it's hard to predict that future, but having some\ncompetition for block space would actually help us get more data on a\nsimilar situation to be able to predict that future better.\nWhat you want to avoid at all cost (the block size actually being\nused), I see as the best opportunity we have to look into the future.\n\n\u003e\u003e What we see today are\n\u003e\u003e transactions enjoying next-block confirmations with nearly zero pressure\n\u003e\u003e to include any fee at all (though many do because it makes wallet code\n\u003e\u003e simpler).\n\u003e\n\u003e\n\u003e Many do because free transactions are broken - the relay limiter means\n\u003e whether a free transaction actually makes it across the network or not is\n\u003e basically pot luck and there's no way for a wallet to know, short of either\n\u003e trying it or actually receiving every single transaction and repeating the\n\u003e calculations. If free transactions weren't broken for all non-full nodes\n\u003e they'd probably be used a lot more.\n\nFree transactions are a gift from miners that run an altruistic policy.\nThat's great but we shouldn't rely on them for the future. They will\nlikely disappear at some point and that's ok.\nIn any case, he's not complaining about the lack of free transactions,\nmore like the opposite.\nHe is saying that's very easy to get free transactions in the next\nblock and blocks aren't full so there's no incentive to include fees\nto compete for the space.\nWe can talk a lot about \"a fee market\" and build a theoretically\nperfect fee estimator but we won't actually have a fee market until\nthere's some competition for space.\nNobody will pay for space that's abundant just like people don't pay\nfor the air they breath.\n\n\u003e What I don't see from you yet is a specific and credible plan that fits\n\u003e within the next 12 months and which allows Bitcoin to keep growing. Not some\n\u003e vague handwave like \"let's all use the Lightning network\" (which does not\n\u003e exist), or \"let's do more research\" (Gavin has done plenty of research), or\n\u003e \"but what about the risks\" (Bitcoin is full of risks). A plan, with dates\n\u003e attached, and a strong chance of actually being deployed in time.\n\nOk, this is my plan: we wait 12 months, hope that your estimations are\ncorrect (in case that my guess was better than yours, we keep waiting\nuntil June 2017) and start having full blocks and people having to\nwait 2 blocks for their transactions to be confirmed some times.\nThat would be the beginning of a true \"fee market\", something that\nGavin used to say was his #1 priority not so long ago (which seems\ncontradictory with his current efforts to avoid that from happening).\nHaving a true fee market seems clearly an advantage.\nWhat are supposedly disastrous negative parts of this plan that make\nan alternative plan (ie: increasing the block size) so necessary and\nobvious.\nI think the advocates of the size increase are failing to explain the\ndisadvantages of maintaining the current size. It feels like the\nexplanation are missing because it should be somehow obvious how the\nsky will burn if we don't increase the block size soon.\nBut, well, it is not obvious to me, so please elaborate on why having\na fee market (instead of just an price estimator for a market that\ndoesn't even really exist) would be a disaster."}