<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>npub13rv3raner7hu6npy7vxxvdswdapae65pnw8jjs4c80wtp2nmg4xq9cy5l4</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub13rv3raner7hu6npy7vxxvdswdapae65pnw8jjs4c80wtp2nmg4xq9cy5l4</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2015-08-11&#xA;📝 Original message:The only reason why Bitcoin has grown the way it has, and in fact the only&#xA;reason why we&#39;re all even here on this mailing list talking about this, is&#xA;because Bitcoin is growing, since it&#39;s &#34;better money than other money&#34;. One&#xA;of the key characteristics toward that is Bitcoin being inexpensive to&#xA;transact. If that characteristic is no longer true, then Bitcoin isn&#39;t&#xA;going to grow, and in fact Bitcoin itself will be replaced by better money&#xA;that is less expensive to transfer.&#xA;&#xA;So the importance of this issue cannot be overstated -- it&#39;s compete or die&#xA;for Bitcoin -- because people want to transact with global consensus at&#xA;high volume, and because technology exists to service that want, then it&#39;s&#xA;going to be met. This is basic rules of demand and supply. I don&#39;t&#xA;necessarily disagree with your position on only wanting to support&#xA;uncontroversial commits, but I think it&#39;s important to get consensus on the&#xA;criticality of the block size issue: do you agree, disagree, or not take a&#xA;side, and why?&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 2:51 PM, Pieter Wuille &lt;pieter.wuille at gmail.com&gt;&#xA;wrote:&#xA;&#xA;&gt; On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 9:37 PM, Michael Naber via bitcoin-dev &lt;&#xA;&gt; bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org&gt; wrote:&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt; Hitting the limit in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. The&#xA;&gt;&gt; question at hand is whether we should constrain that limit below what&#xA;&gt;&gt; technology is capable of delivering. I&#39;m arguing that not only we should&#xA;&gt;&gt; not, but that we could not even if we wanted to, since competition will&#xA;&gt;&gt; deliver capacity for global consensus whether it&#39;s in Bitcoin or in some&#xA;&gt;&gt; other product / fork.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; The question is not what the technology can deliver. The question is what&#xA;&gt; price we&#39;re willing to pay for that. It is not a boolean &#34;at this size,&#xA;&gt; things break, and below it, they work&#34;. A small constant factor increase&#xA;&gt; will unlikely break anything in the short term, but it will come with&#xA;&gt; higher centralization pressure of various forms. There is discussion about&#xA;&gt; whether these centralization pressures are significant, but citing that&#xA;&gt; it&#39;s artificially constrained under the limit is IMHO a misrepresentation.&#xA;&gt; It is constrained to aim for a certain balance between utility and risk,&#xA;&gt; and neither extreme is interesting, while possibly still &#34;working&#34;.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; Consensus rules are what keeps the system together. You can&#39;t simply&#xA;&gt; switch to new rules on your own, because the rest of the system will end up&#xA;&gt; ignoring you. These rules are there for a reason. You and I may agree about&#xA;&gt; whether the 21M limit is necessary, and disagree about whether we need a&#xA;&gt; block size limit, but we should be extremely careful with change. My&#xA;&gt; position as Bitcoin Core developer is that we should merge consensus&#xA;&gt; changes only when they are uncontroversial. Even when you believe a more&#xA;&gt; invasive change is worth it, others may disagree, and the risk from&#xA;&gt; disagreement is likely larger than the effect of a small block size&#xA;&gt; increase by itself: the risk that suddenly every transaction can be spent&#xA;&gt; twice (once on each side of the fork), the very thing that the block chain&#xA;&gt; was designed to prevent.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; My personal opinion is that we should aim to do a block size increase for&#xA;&gt; the right reasons. I don&#39;t think fear of rising fees or unreliability&#xA;&gt; should be an issue: if fees are being paid, it means someone is willing to&#xA;&gt; pay them. If people are doing transactions despite being unreliable, there&#xA;&gt; must be a use for them. That may mean that some use cases don&#39;t fit&#xA;&gt; anymore, but that is already the case.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; --&#xA;&gt; Pieter&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;-------------- next part --------------&#xA;An HTML attachment was scrubbed...&#xA;URL: &lt;http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20150811/becc6fff/attachment.html&gt;</html></oembed>