I don't see how that's the case. If it's a good idea, and everyone's doing it, then the trade-off becomes attractive for just about everyone, so it can happen pretty fast without any centralization. Marching in lockstep doesn't mean centralized (of course; that's the whole idea of Bitcoin in a way).

Isn't there some kind of alert key that goes to every full node? SPV nodes don't matter since they don't care about blocksize. If the problem is just alerting everyone that a fork is coming and they have to choose sides, then what is the worst that can happen? Can someone even operate a full node without seeing the alert?

Yes because almost everyone agrees it should be raised (Greg and Luke excepted, though they agree it should be raised eventually). The poll didn't ask about raising to 20MB.

How do you create a network topology that is decentralized at any scale?

That would have the advantage of quieting the extremists, like Mircea Popescu and his following, who refuse any change at all. Once we have made an upward change, that horse has left the stable.

Plus, if tx volume doesn't simply increase to fill the space but rather miners self-limit, it will suggest that a 20MB (or 8MB) limit isn't going to mess anything up either. It will also be progressively harder to argue for the "well-connected miners torment poorly connected miners with big blocks" attack. In many ways this will be the camel's nose under the tent, as well as serving the purpose you mentioned, that Greg and Luke claim we can hotfix on the fly (if we can, great, let's do that, but if not...).

This all makes sense. Need to keep him on but not give him the keys, exactly.


Just noticed Greg has an XMR address for donations on his profile. He also just published the Borromean Ring Signatures paper. One other thing he said recently about Monero is that there are limited network resources, and we have to decide how much to allocate to decentralization, anonymity, TPS, etc. He is clearly thinking about Monero, probably wants to make it a sidechain or something.

Rusty Russell did some modeling on that today: What Transactions Get Crowded Out If Blocks Fill?

Meni Rosenfeld proposes an elastic block cap where miners are penalized progressively for blocks bigger than whatever the limit is.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1078521.msg11517847

The idea is to avoid a "crash landing" at 1MB or even at 8 or 20MB. Bitcoin adoption is known to come in order-of-magnitude spurts, so even 20MB isn't immune to a crash landing scenario; and think how much harder another order-of-magnitude increase will be from 20MB, or from 200MB.

We need a way to turn these brick walls into gentle hills, not just lengthen the road leading to them. (To be clear, I think we should do both. Actually having no limit probably does both.)

This part seems a bit off. At any given time, some people will have an urgent need for settlement, but many/most won't. So we get smooth scaling for quite a while from a purely economic perspective. Now once we reach a point in adoption where there are so many urgent transactions that they fill the blocks on their own, that kicks up the frustration to unacceptable levels, but even then some will be willing to outbid others and again it's a gradual increase in pain, not a deluge.

Insofar as the prices miners charge do rise properly and users have an easy way of getting their transactions in at some price, fees will limit transactions even in the short term. All you're really describing here is reaching a point that is pretty far along that smooth pain curve, after all the less important transactions have been priced out of the market.

Overall this is a great idea, though!

This seems very plausible.

I did feel that Mike was pushing his points a little unfairly at times in the article, but then it should be relatively easy to bat them down. Greg's response was decent, especially his first point, but it seems like something that will come down to technical points I wouldn't know enough about to judge.  I went ahead and bumped the thread in hopes of getting more responses.

The fact that Greg neglected to point out the Elegius pool's ruining the "test" at the soft limits shows his propensity to grasp at whatever straws look plausibly available as long as it will advance the stance he wants to defend. (Again an unfortunately common debating practice, even in Mike's article and this thread, but once again Greg has it down to an art. Mike it's easy to tell he's doing it; Greg not so much.)

I also note that Matt Corallo actually pointed out that the lack of discussion on some points and seemed to find it odd as well. Sounds again like something interpersonal.

The "Crash Landing" article has been an instrumental piece in convincing the reddit crowd toward bigger blocks.

Would any other devs like to weigh in?

For completeness, here's Jeff Garzik's view, emphasis mine:


Matt Corallo is "rather strongly against any commitment to a block increase in the near future [without more testing]," but seems like he'd go definitely along with at least some increase on Gavin's time frame (if testing panned out), because when asked by Mike Hearn whether he had a specific, credible alternative to Gavin's plan, he said:


Wladimir van der Laan, who seems to be Gavin's appointed lead for the project now, is "weakly against in the near future" because the solution seems to delay better ones. Seems he'd go along if it came down to a fork:


I really don't think we are far from consensus at all, especially for 4-8MB after "more testing" (and especially when there is more urgency). Gmax seems the only real holdout, and even he is for 50% increases repeatedly. Adam Back is still pinning hopes on alternative solutions but I think would go along if it came down to the wire. As for Peter Todd, I'm not sure how much count to give him as he's a little too drama-queenish - if attention moves to XT we know where he'll be

Exactly. There's this weird mismatch in that he should be saying this *first* whenever the debate comes up. I didn't see him even comment on Mike Hearn's "Crash Landing" post, which is nevertheless the one everyone remembers and has in the back of their mind and directly opposes this position.

It's almost like he somehow wants to remain in his pessimistic curmudgeonly state, like he has a vested interest in it (not financial, but emotional/social). He has a way of not addressing the most key issues while looking like he is and looking like he's being the reasonable one. Now that I've read the Press Center thing I can see some parallels.

One classic Gmax thing is to make every statement interpretable in a safe way. For example, today's reddit post where someone was accusing Peter Todd of being biased against an increase because of his affiliation with Viacoin. I don't think there is much merit to the accusation (though that doesn't excuse Todd's sensationalism), but in Greg's reply he said, "Welcome to Reddit, 'Viacoin66'!"

He will say something that looks safe and unantagonizing (just the standard Reddit welcome), but his real purpose is to point out that the account was bran new and imply that it was obviously created to troll Viacoin/Todd. He's probably right about that, but nevertheless it's an example of what I mean where he'll say whatever serves any sort of low-blow purpose in a debate as long as it can be interpreted as not being that. I guess with his security testing mindset he has become Mr. Plausible Deniability.

OK, it's true that a lot of people do things similar to this in debate, but he has it down to an art. It has the effect of making him look blameless unless you know all the context and read between the lines. Again, I suspect this is part of core dev culture, where there is a lot of pressure not to appear inflammatory. Remember Gavin talking about "poisonous people" ruining projects (though he was talking about Luke)?

Luke presented the idea that the "devs = Bitcoin" and should have ultimate say, before he backpedaled on it. I can understand how devs would think that way, but it's of course silly for the reasons you mentioned there.

As for Greg, he does make unfair points whenever he feels he can veil it sufficiently (though so do Gavin and especially Hearn, from what I've seen - is this part of the core dev culture?), but more importantly he has this weirdly cognitively dissonant "I know best and get to decide, but everyone's equal" thing going on, and he's able to make his writing look watertight so that it can't be proven conclusively so he cannot really be caught on it so easily.

It's like he feels like he doesn't get enough respect for what he does, and is owed more sway in the sense of actual control rather than just influence and core dev status. That impulse explains his comment yesterday when he was lamenting all the work he'd done to make it just so things don't break with 1MB blocks (if not for those optimizations Bitcoin with 1MB blocks would be a "smoking hole in the ground" were I believe his words) and yet no one seems to appreciate it, they just want to march forward with even bigger blocks and keep working the hamster while Gavin gets all the glory.

The old underappreciated tech guy syndrome? (But with high-level writing skills)

I got into Bitcoin in mid-2012. Looks like it was before my time, unless I missed something.

I was just remarking offhandedly that I seem to have an unusual ability to read people, though it's only in *some* ways and in some quite limited types of situations.

I think this is pretty decent good-faith attempt at mitigating financial influence, even though it's impossible to do that completely:


Personally I don't think either Adam or Greg are being influenced by the Blockstream entanglement yet, but in the future it is a danger. I think they simply formed Blockstream because of their scaling concerns, not the other way around - as their prior records show. I have a pretty good shill detector, and it was going crazy when I first heard about Open Coin / Ripple Labs   In this debate all I see are ideas and clashes of personality, never felt an agenda.


Very interesting point. My criticism is that they see humans as robots, not adapting, trying to solve everything through a code lens. Perhaps this is just an extension of that same logic.

Note: While the following is all highly speculative as it must be, and though I'm wont to talk about people rather than actual issues, this case seems to warrant it.

I've been looking into Greg Maxwell quite a bit recently. All the core devs actually (except Wladimir), and the blockstream people. Greg seems a sincere and extremely intelligent fellow with the right kind of bent for the job. The way he knocked the wind out of Stellar's sails on Hacker News was quite something, just as one example.

However, I do sense that he and Gavin have a bit of an oil-and-water dynamic going on. I have never seen them debate directly, though that could be because he was busy recently and "caught a bit flat-footed" on Gavin's proposal, as he said. Seems like classic nerd/jock or cat/dog dynamic (I realize Gavin's also a nerd) with weird passive-aggressive miscommunications aplenty. The thing where Gavin said he spent an afternoon reviewing Greg's idea only to not have it acknowledged reminded me of that especially. Still need both sides of the story, and Gavin has his own subtle ways of being bitchy at times if you read between the lines so I won't draw conclusions.

It's most interesting to me, though, that Gavin and Greg have both proposed a series of 50% increases, yet these two seem as you said the main sticking point for this debate. Pieter seems not very entrenched, and Matt I suspect would go along with Greg and Pieter. Luke I'm not sure but on a hunch I'd say he would go wherever the action is dev-wise, despite his principled stances and eccentricities. He's not Mircea Popescu. Adam overall seems eminently reasonable and would probably not do anything disappointing, but that's just my cursory read.

Perhaps it's time to work some social magic to have Greg relax his position a bit. Since I've been reading almost all his posts, I've noticed he gives little glimmers of sunshine at times. He's not an unreasonable person, and despite his hardline stance I can tell he wants more than anything for Bitcoin to succeed. I could swear he gets less accommodative when Gavin's in the thread, though. The rays of sunshine seem to be buried deep in the comments when he's talking to someone else in a thread where Gavin is absent. Maybe just my imagination.

There are issues among such a group of people that we probably can't hope to understand. The politics, the interpersonal clashes, the miscommunications, the lingering grudges tinting things. Again, I think your implication may be right, this may be more a social issue than a technical one.

Here's the correct link from a month ago. I think you've read it before, though: http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34090559/

"Obvious in retrospect," yes, exactly that.

One important mental exercise most people never take the time to do is to consider a future scenario fully, really pretend that it's actually now happened. It's no longer uncertain, because it is a fact of history: "The Bitcoin price is at XXXX." Really think through that, get comfortable with the idea that this has actually happened and the other possibilities that could have happened have simply not happened.

Only then, only when you have completed the illusion of certainty and really convinced yourself, consider how realistic it feels. What would the headlines say? What would these people say? What would be the consequences? How would that relate to this issue and that issue?

Consider the success scenario fully, then reset and consider the failure scenario fully. Go back and forth between them often. Keep weighing them against each other to see which seems more correct, which seems more internally consistent, which explains more data that we already know about. In the failure scenario, many of the things you were hoping about necessarily end up being nothing. In the failure scenario, many of the things you were worried about turn out to be trifling. Every theory is tested from both angles.

At this point I find the success scenario quite a bit more realistic-feeling overall. It might take a while of sideways movement around these prices, but I'm getting the feeling that the next rise is "locked and loaded."