The dollar value is irrelevant. This is like buying Alaska several centuries ago, you get a big share of the total available land on the earth, but maybe that land is not used for a long time

Bitcoin is like land, you can not imagine what kind of value would grow out of it, the only thing for sure is that the supply is limited, so many miners are rushing to reserve their share before something big happens

Ok then maybe 0.1 block reward is better. Block reward will cut by half next year, so eventually fee will rise pass block reward, it is just a matter of time.

Another concern: Block reward halving every 4 years is very drastic. When the block reward get enough small, more and more miners will be shut down, since it does not give miners enough incentive to mine when majority of coins were mined

Since early days of mining, many miners were incentivized to acquire a big enough pie of the total coin supply: "If I get hold of xxx% of the total money supply, then one day if bitcoin economy grow to xxxxx trillion dollar, I will have xxx% of this whole economy". But after mining reward cut by half several times, this incentive will not hold, so it is important to have decent fee income to keep the miners on board. I guess at 6.25 btc block reward the fee could be getting close to block reward

I think the price stagnation is caused by the current confusing status about this block size debate, since it revealed that there is no good decision making mechanism in bitcoin community yet. Once we passed this crisis and there is a well-established consensus decision making mechanism, we will be back to the stable growth path

In fact, during their last test, I was not satisfied with my nodes performance, so I added a line in bitcoin.conf to drop the low fee transactions altogether. If many nodes are doing the same this time, then the test will not have any effect on the network unless they raise the fee enough high

Based on blockchain statistics, most of the transactions are larger than 0.5 bitcoin, so people could tolerate 0.005 bitcoin at ease, means that attackers would need to bid higher than 0.005 bitcoin fee to affect enough transactions to raise a concern

The consensus comes from majority of the community members, not only programmers. Miners, exchanges, payment processors, merchants, investors, speculators, they are all the community member, and they all have different influences on the ecosystem

Programmers are the one that write the consensus into the code. At the beginning of the bitcoin, it worth nothing,  programmers have large influence on its development. But at later stage, many people joined the ecosystem and built it up from all the other area, then these stake holders' involvement and contribution give them more incentive to care about the development of bitcoin

Indeed in open source you can always fork the code and implement your idea, but if you don't have the support from all the other participants in the ecosystem, you are going back to where bitcoin stands 5 years ago

People who strongly support bitcoins are mostly libertarian style entrepreneurs that can make individual judgement, they typically have certain degree of IT and finance competence, would objectively evaluate core dev's proposal. In this case the debate of the block size is more about the social and financial impact instead of a technical issue. I think many of them are more experienced in those area than programmers

Have you noticed that most of the miners switched to support BIP 100? I guess this is because BIP 100 give them more right of decision in the future, so from their point of view this is definitely better than give the decision making power to Gavin. You can see that everyone here is a wolf on the blockchain  

By the way, I'm seeing rising interest of a flex cap which only raises the block size when fee collected in each block is higher than block reward

It is very interesting to see how community react to huge amount of spam transaction with very high fee, say 0.1 bitcoin per transaction

This will effectively push most of the transactions in mempool back in the queue so that they would never get confirmed

However, the fee reward for each block will become almost 100 bitcoins, this will greatly increase the profitability of mining, thus many people will start to mine bitcoin. Difficulty will skyrocket again

At the same time, the attacker would need to buy 14400 bitcoins from exchanges every day to facilitate the test, thus raise the exchange rate exponentially

So it seems that a large scale attack will just strengthen the bitcoin exchange rate, and when the price goes up by 10 fold, existing bitcoin holders can afford a much higher fee to compete with the attacker, and new comers would be attracted by the price rally, and accept a fee as long as it is a couple of percent, which they are familiar with in today's banking system

If the network naturally reach such a limitation, then all the participants will also reduce the transaction frequency and raise their fee to be ahead of the queue, so that eventually will achieve the same result, but slowly over time

This is all in contradiction with today's legacy financial system: In legacy financial systems, people always seek for higher and higher transaction speed to devalue the underlying currency. (mv=pq is the quantitative theory of money, with higher v, p becomes higher, means currency becomes cheaper) It is easy to predict that with lower transaction speed, the value of currency will rise

Notice that we are all born in a fiat money infested world, so we have been brainwashed from birth to take all the reasoning logic from the fiat money financial systems, which encourage lending, frequent spending and higher and higher transaction speed, at a cost of depreciating currency

But bitcoin is totally on the other end of the spectrum, it does not have many similarity with the fiat money system, the traditional utility driven behavior might not fit well with its design

I really want to see a much larger scale test, when every block is full and then we can observe if the orphan rate of blocks will increase significantly (which indicated that miners might change their behavior when blocks are getting bigger). But it seems that the majority of the nodes have learned the trick to filter their spam transaction, even their IP, so this time the attack would only reach very limited number of nodes and packets were quickly dropped

You can not simulate or test the social and economy impact of 8MB blocks in the test net, that's the key difficulty

No one can see the future of a complex decentralized social and economy system, the safest way is to make the change as small as possible, one small step at a time

I'm not talking about the right or wrong of each proposal, by bad I mean someone intentionally disrupt the consensus building process, e.g. insists on his own idea without making effort to modify it or make some compromise to reach consensus

In consensus decision making model, anything that is against the consensus building is negative, the correctness of each proposal itself is irrelevant. We suppose that each proposal is correct from its specific viewing angle, but since the community as a whole must move forward, all of the proposal must be evaluated and eventually merged towards one direction which best present the overall direction

In a centralized democracy system, the minority will have to accept the rule that winners make. But in a decentralized consensus system you always have the right to leave and play your own game. If you think you are right and the rest 90% is wrong, you can just fork your own coin and make your own exchange and start to persuade merchants to accept your coin, etc...

But you might find out that doing so will be extremely difficult without the support from majority of the community, your altcoin most likely will be buried among thousands of other coins and make no sense. So when you make a decision, you will also weigh the value of community support, and since you will get maximum community support when your proposal are not refused by the majority, your proposal will be more cooperative instead of competitive

The thought behind a larger block size is that more users would be able to benefit from extremely low fee of bitcoin transaction, thus drive it to mainstream adoption

But based on my observation, the low fee and fast transaction does not contribute too much to the adoption. Adoption rate always rise when the exchange rate rises (In a fiat money flooded world, no one really need bitcoin to buy groceries, majority of people treat it as investment/speculation, rest are money launderers, drug dealers and gamblers...)

In fact, the exchange rate risk is magnitudes higher than the fee, so spending 0.0001 bitcoin or 0.01 bitcoin for fee really does not make any difference since the biggest cost comes from exchange rate risk

Lol another dumb sentence again. Why do you keep embarrassing yourself? Can you just stop talking about things you don't understand?

I throw your words back to you. You see, all your talk here are empty templates that can apply to anyone anything, does not make any sense

Good points. You can never totally get rid of bad actors that intentionally disturb the decisoin making process

There could be ways to reward the consensus building and punish the opposite. For example, the community first makes several consensus candidates, then holds 3 rounds of opinion poll. Everyone's opinion has a weight factor, if one's opinion is not the major consensus, next time his opinion will have a much less weight, like 50%, if he's opinion is with the majority, he will regain his 100% weight. By this means, those who constantly going against the majority will have less and less influence on the final decision

So when you know that your opinion is against the major consensus, it is time to rethink why there are so many people supporting the major consensus and adjust your position accordingly. The basic principle is that consensus have the highest priority, the participants gains most when they join the major consensus

It's about how to reach a consensus on a complex topic

You don't need any vote for the validity of "1+1=2", you always reach 100% consensus. The reason you need to vote is because the topic is too complex that majority of participants can not grasp

However, if a topic is too difficult for majority to understand, then you have a complexity problem: The complexity make participants lose their decision making ability, thus they have to rely on political practice (to be more precise, dice casting) to make a decision

In such case, I guess simulation will be a better way to see into the future: Suppose that an airplane's crew member are all dead fighting terrorists, none of the survivors have ever flied an airplane, your best bet is to let the one who have played a lot of flight simulation to land the airplane

If the following statement is true then it is not as bright as you described

"In the absence of institutions capable of implementing clear standards, it’s plain that Andresen and Hearn decided to take matters into their own hands. XT is above all a path toward establishing new leadership. I asked Andresen whether, if XT were to achieve full acceptance, he would then include all the earlier Bitcoin core devs in the new XT team. He replied that “[XT] will have a different set of developers. Part of the reason for forking is to have a clear decision-making process for the software development.”

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/inside-the-fight-over-bitcoins-future

True, the fun of mining has been ruined by the huge noise and heat an ASIC miner generates. My approach now is to downvolt and downclock the miners so that they can run on very quiet fans and function as a small heater at no higher than 400W power consumption

Unless the PoW mining changes, the miners are always what secures the network, and more than 50% of hash power could always harm the network, that is a fact, trust them or not

The metaphor is to describe fundamental differences in normal software projects and financial infrastructure

When you upgrade a software, you can always fall back to the old version when the new version does not work or created unexpected behavior

However, when a financial system like bitcoin went wrong following a fork, the loss in financial transaction is permanent , even if you reinstall the old version, the loss is irreversible. This fundamental difference will prevent people from accepting any dramatic change at any time

If you were here during the 2013 fork, you might still remember that some people lost lots of coins following the fork, and those losses are permanent. The solution at that time is that the mining pools and wallet service providers compensated those users. I'm afraid that's not an option today when bitcoin are used at much larger scale and commands much higher value

IT guys do not pay enough attention to an important fact that a monetary system is not a software project, they have totally different priorities. Thus any kind of change that is normal for a software project can be devastating for a monetary system

Imagine that Federal Reserve change the USD version every 3 months, and even fork it once a while, so that USD from New York is not interchangeable with USD from California, just because New York FED and San Francisco FED have different view on QE, then the whole US economy will be in chaos like what happened in North Korea

 You are basically proving that you have the same mindset as Gavin: The smartest should be the king and rule others. Unfortunately, people vote with their foot when they feel that you are smarter 

Indeed, the bitcoin development is already centralized, but at least a group of core devs can still balance each other. But if you go for the XT branch which have exclusive leadership under Gavin, then you better understand what you are doing. Here are some text you should check about the governance model in GIT:

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/inside-the-fight-over-bitcoins-future

"Theoretically, any user of an open-source program is free to create, adopt, or reject any alterations he pleases; in practice, software shared on networks or between users requires painstaking standardization. This means relying on decision-makers with “commit access,” who have the right to amend a software project directly, on their own. This status represents a high level of developer control, and of user trust.

Andresen told me that, to his recollection, when Nakamoto withdrew from the project (and from public view), in 2011, only he, Nakamoto, and possibly one other person had commit access to Bitcoin’s software. Andresen eventually granted this level of access to four additional developers, for a total of five “core devs.” In April, 2014, Andresen decided to devote more of his time to other projects, and named one of the core devs, Wladimir van der Laan, to succeed him as lead developer. Even today, only van der Laan and Andresen can grant commit access to other developers of Bitcoin Core.

“Right now,” Andresen added, “just Mike and I have commit access to Bitcoin XT.”

"In the absence of institutions capable of implementing clear standards, it’s plain that Andresen and Hearn decided to take matters into their own hands. XT is above all a path toward establishing new leadership. I asked Andresen whether, if XT were to achieve full acceptance, he would then include all the earlier Bitcoin core devs in the new XT team. He replied that “[XT] will have a different set of developers. Part of the reason for forking is to have a clear decision-making process for the software development.”