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An issue that has been the source for months of debate and rancor throughout the Bitcoin mining and developer community over Bitcoin's block size appears to have reached a long-awaited resolution. Within the most recent BitcoinXT update, Gavin Andresen has begun the process of revising the block chain individual block size from 1 MB to 8 MB starting next year. This is deemed necessary for the overall growth and usability of Bitcoin, as the current limits of seven transactions per second are becoming insufficient for the growing global community as consumer and business interest increases.

These impending updates were revealed on GitHub, and this is what is in store for the upcoming “hard fork”, taken directly from GitHub, posted by Gavin Andresen:

Implement hard fork to allow bigger blocks. Unit test and code for a bigger block hard fork.

Parameters are:

    8MB cap
    Doubling every two years (so 16MB in 2018)
    For twenty years
    Earliest possible chain fork: 11 Jan 2016
    After miner supermajority (code in the next patch)
    And grace period once miner supermajority achieved (code in next patch)

The 1 MB block size debate has been a constant issue for months, with Andresen and Mike Hearn discussing the need to upgrade the block size to as much as 20 MB. China's major exchanges and mining interests came out against any block size changes initially, deriding the extra operating costs and complexities involved with mostly empty blocks. After further review, the increase was deemed warranted to an 8 MB size, much smaller than the 20 MB requests by the Core Developers. An accord was reached, and the revisions will take effect next year.

We attempted to contact Hearn and Andresen for more information and will provide updated information as it becomes available. It seems some details are still to be sorted out in the next coding batch within the coming days. We’ll keep our readers informed of any further developments.

What do you think of these new core updates and the automatic changes every two years? Share above and comment below.

Source : https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-block-size-conflict-ends-latest-update/ (https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-block-size-conflict-ends-latest-update/)

Conflicts has not ended yet. It will end once Bitcoin Core increase block size limit.

Does that mean in 20 years after it starts doubling the blocks will be 8192 MB, which is 8.192 GB per block?

Have I done my maths right?

8 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 8192

To keep it simple I'm not considering the difference between mebibytes and megabytes.

Yes but 20 years ago we had this:
http://www.computertutorflorida.com/blog/uploaded_images/tandy-700575.jpg

The computers now are not comparable with the one from 20 years ago, unthinkable even.
And the computers from 20 years in the future will be unthinkably fast as well, so I guess blocks of 8.2 gb will not be a problem.

Well, let's see the sequel, it seems need more information.


What? that's too much right :-\ He told doubling every 2 years, so every 2 years increased 8MB. The parameters will implement next years(2016) and then in 2018 increase 8MB, so 8+8=16MB.  
You means 20 years after starts. Start from 2016 and the end is 2036.

8MB(2016) + 8MB = 16MB(2018) + 8MB = 24MB(2020) + 8MB = 32MB(2022) + 8MB = 40MB(2024) + 8MB = 48MB(2026) + 8MB = 56MB(2028) + 8MB = 64MB(2030) + 8MB = 72MB(2032) + 8MB = 80MB(2034) +8MB = 88MB in 2036.
CMIIW.


~iki

I like the idea of doubling every 4 years instead of every 2 years.

Not months;  Years.  The same dire predictions of impending disaster are not new either and have accompanied each one of these pushes.

Hearn has lobbied for essentially unlimited capacity as long as I can remember.  The 2011/2012 timeframe at least.  Tainting also.  Though it is not totally fair to characterize his lobbying as 'for', it is certainly fair to say that it was not 'against'.  Tainting and industrial level infrastructure are joined at the hip in some ways.

I like this.  Any chance core will go along with this?

I like the idea I read of a floating system that adjusts block size as needed, but I suppose this system is not horrible.  Now that there is a plan in place lets cross our fingers for a smooth transition.

Conflict is far from over... We can all breath a sigh of relief when/if the changes go ahead (which I hope they do).

Things are looking good, people are now actually coding solutions, instead of just discussing them, and progress is being amde... Let's see where we're at January next year :)

so they anticipated the hard fork, to january instead of the planned march

also if it will double every two years for twenty years it mean a maximum of 256MB, which is around 1000tx max per seconds, still far below what it is visa right now

it is funny that some people cant look in the future (or in the past) isnt it  :) ?

Wait, I don't understand, if it doubles every 2 years, it is 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, right?  It starts at 8 then doubles 10 times?  I am not so good at math, so maybe I am misunderstanding it.  But I am glad to see something move forward on this issue.

ah yeah i confused the original every two years with the block halving, so it double for 10 times and not 5

"Do you even math?"
I can't even figure out how you got 256 MB? 2^8 is 256; however the number will double 10 times according to Gavin. I'm surprised.
Update: That explains it.

No, it does not seem much. You're mistaken with your calculation. Do you even know what the definition of 'doubling' is?
So it is not 'add 8MB every two years for twenty years'.

In 2036 we are going to have 8192 MB blocks. Since it is also acceptable to use 1000 (MB = GB) instead of 1024, we can say that we are going to have ~8.2GB blocks. This actually might probably not be that much in 20 years. We can't really tell now. If we assume that our current tps is 3, we are going to have a tps of 24, 576 in 2036. The number doesn't seem that bad, however more is required for mainstream adoption.
Calculation: 3 x 8 x 2^10; 3 tps times 8 MB blocks (2016) times doubling ten times.

Details of consensus agreement by other Bitcoin devs?

I wonder. The laptop I'm using to type this on is seven years old. It still runs the most up to date video and photo programs that I ask of it and the spec is only a few % off what you'd buy now, albeit for less.

Consumer computing machinery seems to be becoming smaller and less energy intensive but relatively static in terms of specs.

As ever it's bandwidth that'll be the bitch. My broadband hasn't had any type of upgrade in well over a decade. I'm sure it'll keep up in a few megacities but outside those places progress is going to lag big time.

There hasn't been an agreement. The article is misleading. The conflict hasn't ended. It's more like shots have been fired.

Bandwidth is going to be one of the biggest issues, and it's complicated.

More video services means more bandwidth is required. ISPs don't really benefit, its just a sunk cost that benefits Youtube or Netflix. Where is the incentive to invest in more bandwidth? We've just had throttling being addressed with a commitment to net neutrality.

A popular Bitcoin network in 20 years time will likely see TBs of data being transferred between groups of peers.  Will video demand indirectly create bandwidth for Bitcoin?

What about developing countries? There is no real internet infrastructure now, so why would there be one in 20 years? Developing countries could benefit most from Bitcoin, but they have the least developed bandwidth infrastructure. Even if they build some internet services, will they be able to run TBs of data, or will developing countries rely on SPVs only?

I do not agree with you. I don't believe that the performance/specification difference is only a few percentage. Performance has been improving with each release, however sometimes by only a small margin.
I'm disregarding laptops in the comparison; Desktop side: Let's assume that someone made a desktop PC with the best available CPU at that time, which would be the Intel® Core™ i7-965 Extreme Edition. We can easily compare that with the currently best CPU in the Extreme Edition lineup and that would be the Intel Core i7 5960X. Comparison  (http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-965-vs-Intel-Core-i7-5960X), here are some examples:

If you compare GPU performance it is going to range from a 10 to 20x increase in terms of performance.

Okay let's get back on track. Unless we actually have quite better hardware in 20 years time, this might become a problem. We might need a heavy pruning feature.
If we assume that all of the blocks will be almost full, we would have:
7 GB x 6 blocks per hour x 24 hours = 1008 GB per day.

Interesting context:

https://i.imgur.com/BzEhlt0.gif

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ame17/a_payment_network_for_planet_earth_visualizing/

I'm not sure 8 GB blocks would ever be needed. If Bitcoin became the global currency standard, there is still a finite number of transactions/second that humans would perform. Even with the Internet of Things doing transactions autonomously, I doubt the transaction volume will double every two years.

A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation tells me that the 8 GB blocks would be able to handle several million transactions/second. That is far in excess of even VISA/Mastercard peak volumes right now. (Oddly enough, I have a project I'm brainstorming that if fully successful would actually need that million TX/second today, not in the far future... just wish there was a proven technology that could handle it today.)

This reminds me of the quote attributed to Thomas John Watson Sr. of IBM in 1943. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson) There is also the quote attributed to Bill Gates in the 1980's regarding 640KB of RAM. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-systems/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html (http://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-systems/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html) While the Watson and Gates quotes are the subject of much dispute the following one from Digital Equipment Corp. founder Ken Olsen in 1977 is not Now while IBM and Microsoft are still around where exactly is Digital Equipment Corp.?

My one criticism of this proposal its that the doubling stops after 20 years, thereby keeping a max blocksize limit in Bitcoin.

No, but that wouldn't be "consensus" anyway.  People need to shake this misguided notion that all developers have to agree all the time.  That's not what consensus means.  Developers don't have any special rights in that regard, nor should they.  Open source software means anyone, whether a core dev or not, can release a client with modified code.  It's the users who decide whether or not they want to use that code.  Consensus is achieved by those securing the network.  If a majority of those users decides to support a change, that change goes ahead.  I'm pretty sure if there hadn't been any action taken by Gavin and Mike, that someone else would have released a client with the same or similar modifications, because there are enough people who think this change needs to happen. 

I don't know why they're worrying about changing it so fast. The transaction volume has been almost flat for two years and the market cap is still dropping and has been for a year and a half. Do the devs have this fantasy that if they change the blocksize magically people are going to start flocking back to Bitcoin and the market cap will jump back up to 14b from its current 3b?

Block increased size is a major issue related to the Bitcoin neutrality.

Why not core upgrade? XT sounds very altcoin

Nothing can double every 2 years forever, basically the amount of RAM has almost no increase for past 5 years in latest computers, and the average home network bandwidth just stayed at 100MB for several years already

Here's what I figure is the main sources of panic:

Maxwell and company's 'elements (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085271.0)' some of which are already in alpha so it seems.  This has a very real potential to launch Bitcoin to a sphere where it will be most difficult to control and/or dislodge.  This may be the last opportunity to plant seeds of destruction (e.g., exponential growth.)

As I've said before, every time the issue of blocksize comes up (and it seems to be bi-annually for the last 3 years or so) we here the same chorus of imminent disaster and blah, blah, blah.  At the end of the day a natively batch-mode architecture sucks as an exchange currency for buying coffee.  It'll be out-competed by other solutions or modified to something other than what it started out as.  Or both.

I think that modification and the associated profit is what their after. Bitcoin is moving completely away from a libertarian Wall Street destroyer to a mainstream NASDAQ regulated blacklisting tool for government tracking. 

I have the same doubt . gavin is  too hurry for the xt hard fork . And it seems he is performing even more irrational from the "Latest Update" . there must be something wrong  ???

Well i for one am glad there is positive progress being made, and the idea of doubling with time seams like a adequate solution.
I believe that the progress of technology will swallow that size and bandwidth w/o any issues, judging how far we're getting each year on.

cheers

if this goes through, in the long run, bitcoin will be doomed. 

increasing tps when there is no need and allowing foreign data on the blockchain for programmers to play with will destroy bitcoin value and your investment.

allowing mass amounts of data in the blockchain for little to no fee will make your bitcoin blockchain worthless.

for bitcoin to continue a market based fee structure needs to exist, if there is too much demand, fees must be higher.  if you do not value your single btc send/recieve transaction then the whole network is worthless.

The chart does tell us that a certain group tried to manipulate some numbers recently. However I do not believe that Bitcoin XT will cause "huge problems". It is essentially the same as Bitcoin Core but with just a few additional patches done by Gavin. I don't think that it will cause huge problems.
Forking is necessary. I'm not talking about the current situation. Your last part is incorrect. It should update whenever possible, including bugfixes and improvements. However we should only do forks if we reach consensus (not that easy).

So much fear and panic for no reason.  None of those scenarios you've described are particularly likely.  There's only a slim chance that any exchange who knows what they're doing would willingly stay on the chain with less support.  They would risk damaging their reputation if they lost their customers money as a result of following the wrong chain, so there's no incentive for them to do that.  The only exception to that would be MPEX, as they've stated they won't accept any changes, but screw MP and all of his crackpot supporters.

The network hash rate has stabilised, but hasn't dropped by any significant amount.  The network is in no way, shape or form "weak".  In fact, it's more than twice as strong than it was this time last year.  The fork will only go ahead with majority support, so what you're saying about the fork being easy even if no one supports it is simply nonsense.  

If you think a fork "destroys centralisation", you clearly have no idea what the word means.  The users securing the network decide what software they want to run.  If the majority decides to support a change, that change goes ahead.  Anyone, core dev or not, can release modified code, but it's down to the users whether or not they decide to support that modification.  There's no logic in saying "one group of developers thinks A, so we all have to agree with that, but if you agree with this group of developers who thinks B, suddenly it's centralisation".  You can't have it both ways.  If you genuinely wanted a coin where a majority of users can't change the protocol, then you would actually want a centralised, closed-source coin where users don't have a say.  If that's what you want, I'm afraid you're in the wrong place.

I honestly can't tell whether you're just giving into hysteria through lack of understanding, or if this is a deliberate attempt to FUD.  Either way, most of what you've said needs some serious rethinking.  For someone considering themselves a "true Bitcoiner", it doesn't seem like you've grasped certain core concepts very well.

There is no way hardware can keep up with that doubling.... this is not a wise plan..

He's just spreading nonsense and one should ignore him. As already previously mentioned Bitcoin had a much higher block size limit. The change right now is not optional but is rather going to be a necessity.
There are people around here that think that their ideology is the right one, but in most cases it is false. Forking isn't a "nuclear option", it is a way to introduce changes/features that can't be done with a soft work.
Changes to the block structure, difficulty and other fundamental rules require a hardfork. Generally hardforks are used to correct something while softforks are used to introduce something new/useful (e.g. P2SH was introduced via a soft fork).

It should be able to keep up if companies stop releasing products that are only minor upgrades or rebrands. The internet speed/bandwidth might be a problem in places such as China. However, hopefully something else is going to be released that will be able to manage the amount of transactions that we need.

It is one thing to temporarily increase the size to give a bit more breathing room for sidechains , payment channels and the lightning network to be tested and another thing to simply double the limit every two years to remove the pressure of discovering more efficient means of scaling.

This is a horrible plan and one that I cannot support. (coming from someone that has defended Gavin and Hearn in the past)


It isn't blockchain bloat and hard disk space I'm concerned with but network latency and bandwidth which won't scale that quickly.

Many valid security and centralization concerns, some of which satoshi szabo is concerned with -
https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/611259452402987008

8 MB cap is a good compromise for now.

What does market cap have to do with this? It's just a measure of price by supply, not a measure of transaction volume.

That way over simplification doesn't even come close to the reason to watch market cap. A common misconception is that the higher the price the larger the economy. Price usually misrepresents an assets actual worth. The classification of Bitcoins market cap allows investors to gauge the growth versus risk potential. Large caps mostly indicate slower growth with lower risk. Small caps have higher growth potential but with a much higher risk potential. Using this basic investing formula shows us that Bitcoin had more long term value when it had a large market cap than it does now. In other words, the risk profile is greater now and the devs are prepping a hard fork that will allow a rapid massive influx of new users which increases the risk. Market cap is a relatively good way to quickly value an asset. That's because prices are generally based on investors expectations of earning potential. As earnings rise, traders will bid more for the price. Understand?

History indicates otherwise. Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth http://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/ (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/) 50% per year compounded so a doubling every two years is actually below that.

Edit: 1.5^20 > 3325 vs 2^10 = 1024

The link you provided cites advertised plans boasting hypothetical peak bandwidth possibilities and not real life bandwidth averages.

Additionally, this doesn't address all the concerns:

1) Latency caused by larger blocks incentivizes the centralization of mining pools
2) Not everyone worldwide lives in locations which has bandwidth growing at the same rates
3) Advertised bandwidth rates are not the same as real world bandwidth rates
4) ISPs often put soft caps on total bandwidth transferable per month  on accounts and stunting the user speed to a crawl.  More are no longer advertising unlimited bandwidth per month and setting clear total amount transferable limits and hardcaps with overage charges.
5) Full nodes at home need to compete with the bandwidth needs of HD video streaming used by most users which is getting increasingly demanding. Most people don't want to expend most of their bandwidth on supporting a full node and stop streaming Netflix and or torrenting.
6) Supporting nodes over TOR is a concern
7) Most ISP plans are asynchronous and have much slower upload speeds that are also not growing at the same rates as download speeds.
8 There are interesting attacks possible with larger blocks - http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/578.pdf

Lets look at the historical account of real world bandwidth averages -


http://explorer.netindex.com/maps?country=United%20States

1/2008      5.86 Mbps
12/2008    7.05 Mbps
12/2009    9.42  Mbps
12/2010    10.03  Mbps
12/2011    12.36   Mbps
12/2012    15.4   Mbps
12/2013    20.62   Mbps
12/2014    31.94  Mbps

Thus you can see that even if I were to ignore many parts of the world where internet isn't scaling as fast and focus on the "first world", bandwidth speeds aren't scaling up as quickly as you suggest.

You have to take into account that these measurements are download speeds. However what's the real bottleneck are upload speeds, which are far below that.

Also these measurements are short-term and for direct ISP-connectivity only (this is on what Nielson's observations are based on). These measurements and growth rates are in no way applicable to a decentralized multi-node network. In addition most ISPs have explicit or implicit data transfer limitations - they will throttle down your connection if you exceed a certain transfer volume.

So I fully agree with your assessment that Hearn's and Gavin's plan is horrible - in fact, it's even more horrible than you've shown.
There's no way I will ever support such a fork.

ya.ya.yo!

Correct ...I added 2 more items while you were typing. Except, keep in mind those speed are the total combined upload and download speeds so 31.94 Mbps average means 21.88MBps download and 9.86MBps upload in 12/2014 thus the situation is worse than what you are even suggesting.

When you look at many other countries the growth is much slower as well. I was deliberately taking one of the better case scenarios to be generous.


all these numbers I am citing are only considering Broadband as well, and not mobile which is much slower and with much lower soft caps.
All these users are sharing these node demands with other data , much of it streaming video which is very demanding. Their proposal will essentially make hosting a full node at home a thing of the past in time.
 

Moore's law is not a law but a trend. The bitcoin foundation already went almost bankrupt betting on a trend.

We can increase the size when the trend materialises, not before.

btw I am pretty sure my internet speed in Australia did not increase x8 in last 6 years.

Decentralisation is Bitcoins unique killer feature and I believe it should be the top priority, even if it results in slower user growth short term.
 

The real answer is not to just invest in BTC, but have some LTC, Peercoin, NXT, even Doge etc etc.

If BTC does fail LTC or others will take its place and not make the same mistakes.

The correct answer is to go with Gavin's idea except double the block size every 4 years instead of 2.

We can fork it again later, but with the more conservative approach, you can give some love to the Chinese and keep them happy.

Moore's law now is used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.
The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: quality-adjusted microprocessor, memory capacity, this trend has continued for more than half a century, "Moore's law" should be considered an observation or projection and not a physical or natural law.

Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth.
Gordon Moore in 2015 foresaw that the rate of progress would reach saturation: "I see Moore’s law dying here in the next decade or so."

However, The Economist news-magazine has opined that predictions that Moore's law will soon fail are almost as old, going back years and years, as the law itself, with the time of eventual end of the technological trend being uncertain.

Hard disk drive areal density

Network capacity

Source (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law)


Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of the Intel Corporation and Fairchild Semiconductor, In 1975, he revised the forecast doubling time to two years.
The period is often quoted as 18 months because of Intel executive David House, who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster)

How long will it take for all the 21 Million BTC subsidy to be unlocked? Perhaps it was too fine tuned with Moore's law.

Physical data storage Kryder's law and with new solid state memory technology may have accelerated this area of development into Moore's law territory.

Network bandwidth tuned to Nielsen's Law.

Start with 2MB next year, double the block size every 2 years

I hardly doubt that that would be enough. Even though the number would only be 4 times less, and in 20 years we would have 2GB blocks.
We would only have 6 (in practice; theoretical is 14) transactions per second until 2018. I think that we might need more.

This is not a thread about discussing Moore's law, or other similar ones. Let us not drift away too much.

Finally. But it caught me by surprise when they announced that the block size will double every two year which I think need to reconsider whether it would be practical in the long run. It's not the computer spec that we are talking about over here because for me, processing power can scale up accordingly but what is more worrying is the internet bandwidth usage. Where I come from, it will mean paying a ton for the bills.

Looks like those bandwidth test averages  are even more optimistic than we both assumed as they mainly deal with burst speeds, have some flaws, and don't consider packet limiting and restrictions done by ISPs.



------------------------------------------------


This is better, but I still don't like the idea of creating a framework where we continuously "kick the can down the road" and what is does to de-incentivize better solutions. I do agree with Gavin and Hearn that we should increase the limit, and it is better to do so before we start hitting the blocklimit continuously, for the sake of temporarily buying some more time to implement and test other solutions and do empathize with them as to why they want to incorporate code to scale automatically so they can avoid this multi-year hard fork debate in the future... but this "crisis" is actually a good thing because it is forcing us to think of creative solutions and test more.

 

No, the 8102MB are correct. You only summarized 8MB each 2 years, you need to double the max blocksize of the previous year.

Though 8.1GB per block, so each minute, sound extreme. Ok, 20 years in the future is a long way but still. I wonder how harddiscspace will develop till then. Or whatever we will use to write data on then.  ::)

The point is that Bitcoin does not scale well to process all transactions natively. It's simply a waste of resources to process all microtransactions on the blockchain. Microtransactions < $ 1 simply do not need the same level of security as bigger transactions. They should move off-chain/side-chain/second-layer.

The max_blocksize should be increased conservatively to ensure that decentralization is not hurt, because decentralization gives Bitcoin value. Solutions for microtransactions are being developed right now.

Hearn's and Gavin's plan is simply not well thought out and outright dangerous for the future of Bitcoin as a decentralized currency. Relying on Moore's / Nielson's "law" is simply linear extrapolation of past trends (based on a very limited timespan), without any evidence that these past trends can be sustained in future. There are natural boundaries for e.g. further miniaturization, so betting on these trends for another 20 years is unwise.

ya.ya.yo!

At first I thought you were being alarmist, but I came to the conclusion that you are absolutely correct once I realized as you did that:

- Increasing the block limit to X MB guarantees that every block will be exactly X MB
- Bandwidth is a limiting factor right now, since 1MB barely makes it over a 14.4k baud modem in 10 minutes, and that's the best we now have
- Miners have absolutely no control over block size whatsoever, and no method (such as transaction fee policies) to decide which transactions to include
- This proposed code change is permanent and can never ever be revised based on future facts

I'm picking up on the sarcasm so let me address your comments:


Agreed. Just like now where most blocks are 20-30% full we cannot assume that transaction volume will automatically fill the available block limit. Like Gavin and Hearn, I think it is prudent to prepare for this possibility beforehand whether it is caused by an attacker "testing" the network or wide scale adoption. Thus one should test for and understand the tradeoffs with all the available block being used to prepare for it.


Bandwidth is fine right now, but there are other considerations to consider like miners concern of propagation time (some are already purposely limiting or not including transactions for a slight edge), running a node over TOR, and I have shown that historically network bandwidth hasn't scaled at the same rate of what is being proposed.


Miners ultimately decide what the limit to set will be as they can choose to include transactions or not even if developer increase the block limit. My concern with this is the same concern I have with Garziks proposal. The fact that 5 Chinese companies control 60% of the hashrate and can set the limit with or without any developers agreeing concerns me. I would be much happier giving miners more control if the hashrate was more distributed but we are a long ways off from that at the moment.  


Sure , we can always switch it back with another hard fork... but why not come to consensus on a proposal that is best for the community and properly tested to avoid the negative PR and a few more years of work debating and testing.

Gavin Just submitted the BIP a couple days ago.... so its still early on the testing . We should probably test his suggestion on a testnet  under various scenarios before we agree or disagree with it. Initially, I don't think it is a wise proposal, but I am certainly open to my mind being changed with the right evidence.

Bitcoin XT is a fork of Bitcoin that almost no one uses, why care what Gavin and Mike are doing with it?

Even though i dont like the way gaving and hearn handling things with something like an extortion, the solution is most probably most near to what will happen in the future. Moores law is the most exact thing we can guess that it will develop.

Saying that... if its another way at the end then nothing prevents us from changing the protocol again and adjusting to the actual needs then.

I think we should increase the size of blocks slowly, double every 3 or 4 years. This will increase the fees paid by user to maintain the network and encourage the development of sidechain, so that main chain grows slowly.

Hold on Nancy, i think we've got a broad consensus forming in the community to exclude Gavin and Mike from the devteam ... so what's that shit you've been talking about again?

I guess the problem here is that once it's applied and being used it would take another fork to change the rules. I'm not sure if they could code a changing block size, however I think that might be prone to abuse(?).
What evidence do you have to support a doubling every 3 or 4 years? How do you know that that is the right call?