Current network already can handle traffic at 16MB, if the volume doubles each year, that's no problem for another 4 years. And there is no point to forecast anything beyond 4 years (Government might ban bitcoin at that time, or bitcoin out-competed by a world coin setup by world largest banks using blockchain, too many uncertainties)

Currently fastest fiber network can do 255Tbps
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fastest-network-could-carry-all-the-internet-traffic-single-fiber

And if you can successfully do a hard fork, it is very beneficial for bitcoin, means in future, many changes and optimization can be done on the current architecture cleanly without using deceptive soft-fork hack

Does not work for me who constantly swapping wallet.dat

In fact, if you carefully analyze this announcement, it is full of holes and incorrect terms(What is that "non-witness data"?), obviously written by someone who don't even understand segwit. So it is just chinese miners are intentionally making a deal, without even look at who is making the deal with them  

Why chinese miners are scared by a hard fork? Because a hard fork might cause large amount of coin withdraw from their FRB operated exchanges and that may cause a bank run on them. So there are lots of shady things going behind the scene

We know that bitcoin is created to prevent FRB from happening, so ironic, now FRB become the tool to prevent bitcoin from happening

No one takes that round table proposal seriously, don't we lack of these kind of announcement/proposal year over year?  

1. None of the core devs are in the meeting, Adam signed that letter as "individual", these days everyone can represent himself as bitcoin CEO
2. The proposal is just a pie in the sky promise, does not provide any details about the hard fork and how it is going to be implemented
3. It is just a move trying to push in an architecture change (SegWit) that is impossible to pass chinese miners or core devs' approval in near future
4. Chinese miners will understand later that they get nothing by doing everything for Blockstream, and trash it just like they trash the classic support proposal

This is not a consensus, just a statement from FOMC meeting. And these miners seems never stick to their words: One day they support classic, another day they support blockstream, I guess next time they will have their own devs and support nobody

Blockstream obviously does not want to raise the block size, if they do, then they can do it today right now. So their plan is to first send LN into rail. But in order to make people use LN, they must limit the transaction on chain, so they will come up with another idea later, like 99% consensus HF.  But someone already raised legal issues about LN hubs, they are financial institution and must be regulated in US, and not allowed in China

So far nothing more interesting than the old style enterprise politics power grab, I hoped bitcoin can do better but obviously almost all the things that have lots of value ends up like this

Ultimately, it is those who have the most coins decide. It does not matter if localbitcoins would support the minority coin, the price there will be single digits due to the millions of coins' sell pressure

Of course if the exchanges can not reach a consensus (basically they follow the major hash power), then it means the consensus is not yet enough strong, it must come from enough users , exchanges and miners together, so 75% hash rate is enough strong, given enough support from exchanges and users

Imagine an extreme situation: A person with 1% of hash power but holds 90% of coins and billions of dollars, he can destroy any fork he does not like and force all the hash power move to his fork by pumping the exchange rate of his fork

I think it is wrong to think that you are still running standard bitcoin, it is not bitcoin anymore, it is already forked so many times and now it is very different than original bitcoin, and after the implementation of segwit, the architecture had major change, I think that version should change name to Pietercoin

This is only technically, and you have financial measure: First make sure non of the major exchanges support the exchange of the minority coin, and then using millions of pre-fork coin to crash the value of minority coin if there is any exchange for that coin, so when the value of that coin goes to single digits, it will be less valuable than even litecoin, no hash power will stay, and that chain will die in a few days maximum

If a block contains 1MB data, and typically 2000 transactions, then each transaction is estimated at 0.5KB. In fact I have seen some blocks containing almost 3000 transactions, and cointape estimate average transaction to be 258 bytes right now

I have checked the rawmempool and indeed found some very large transactions, but to match your number (40k transactions for 1GB), each of them should be 25K, which is almost 100 times larger than average transaction, all 100+ sigop transactions?

Thanks, good to know this is normal, because I have observed this phenomenon for years. I never cared too much since it is still small comparing to the total free memory. However I'm seeing tradeblock using a different way to calculate the mempool size, it is always related to the unconfirmed transactions in mempool, not growing linearly

In your case, 40K transactions would result in 20M maximum mempool, not 1GB. Since you have 40K transactions, and each of them is 0.5KB maximum, what are all those other memories used for?

This is not my machine, but my machine is having similar problem and now it is over 225MB after 10 days of running. Maybe I'm just too lazy to build the bitcoind from source

Exactly, another benefit is that added demand for bandwidth and components from bitcoin is very similar to added demand from high end gaming industry, it will create new jobs and new technology, thus is good for economy in general

http://bitcointicker.co/networkstats/
You can see from this site, for more than 10 days, the mempool size steadily grew beyond 80MB, and the operator did a restart of the process, then it start to build from 0 again, but it always goes up no matter what is the queue size of transactions


And this is not the same as I see on tradeblock, they seems to have it under 10MB most of the time

Although the individual miner's reward does not change, but the total amount of miners on the minority chain will dramatically decrease, so all the miners on minority chain will only be able to find a block every 40 minutes,  to get a transaction well confirmed on that chain would take 240 minutes, this basically drives out all the transactions on that chain. And when no one is using that chain, the exchange rate will crash, and miners become underwater and moved to majority chain

Change POW is suicide because of the existing of arbitraging

As soon as the Pow changed, mining cost will crash to much lower level than exchange rate, then people will mine coins and immediately sell for a huge profit, or borrow coins to sell on exchanges and mine them back for a huge profit, eventually the exchange rate will crash to the mining cost

Of course if no coins can be mined in future, that change might be possible, but the miners will get mining income from fees, so it should basically follow the same pattern

Users don't care what system they are using, if there is really a market demand, then this solution will be widely spread by the time your solution is ready and pass major consensus threshold (might take years). However if no one is interested in micro payment channels thus no one is buying into 21inc's solution(as my research indicated), then it is a good indicator that your R&D direction is wrong

Yes bitcoin is not democracy, it is consensus, but to form a consensus is extremely time consuming. It could drag you years to make a decision, much less efficient then a simple company like 21 inc directly implement what they want without the need for reaching agreement among core devs

In fact I'm still wondering about the governance model in Git, IMO any of the core devs can wipe out all the changes done by other core devs. I don't see how a controversial change like segwit or blocksize increase can make their way into GIT without all the 5 guys agree to it. Even a 2MB increase could drag for one year, a large change like segwit is estimated about 2 years at best

This is a test of how big the micro payment market is

Based on my research, it is very small, mostly on a few special occasions (refill the telephone card/monthly subway ticket etc...) If there is really a big market, then 21inc will immediately occupy it long before any other solutions coming out. If there is very little market demand, then we will know it is the wrong direction to work on, it will just result in lots of wasted R&D for a function that no one really cares about

https://21.co/learn/intro-to-micropayment-channels/#introduction-to-micropayment-channels

This is a fully functional and very neat micropayment channel, but using a second layer approach without modifying the bitcoin protocol. It seems those 100 million dollars really can make some difference  

Is this slide written to win an election?

libsecp256k1 is good, rest is not needed. Now we have LN realized on 21inc's computer,
https://21.co/learn/intro-to-micropayment-channels/#introduction-to-micropayment-channels

It clearly showed that you don't need to mess with bitcoin protocol to make those extra features. When LN is not needed, SW is not needed, because then the txid problem will be trivial, back to scaling with lifting block size  

As anticipated, all other off-chain solutions without touching the bitcoin protocol will be much faster to develop. They don't need to wait for 18 months for a major consensus to be formed within core devs, and that might even trigger a hard fork and derail the whole business plan

Why do you need Lightning Network to open a payment channel when two merchant can simply opening an account in each other's platform and establish a payment channel?

Let's borrow Peter Todd's famous word: If it is already so then why make it worse?  

The fundamental difference here is that many people don't think core devs are enough smart to overthrow the design of Satoshi (If they are, they would have invented bitcoin long before Satoshi), and Satoshi's vision is possibly beyond the comprehension of most of the people here

Of course this view is for those who prefer following authorities. And if you don't like the idea of following authorities, then you should make your own judgement based on your own research and understanding. In fact almost none of the people understand what is segwit, and if you do, it must be a mistake like Lauda said