The miners can mine a secondary chain pretty much as easily as they could mine double-sized blocks on the primary chain.

The primary good provided by the primary chain is the most difficult proof of work on the planet. Providing that with as few overhead costs such as bandwidth and storage as possible seems like a very good idea, the old do one thing and do it well approach. Accommodating day to day expenses, maybe even accommodating monthly salary paycheques, can easily be delegated to a secondary chain, and even smaller amounts to more secondary chains, allowing the primary chain to as efficiently as possible enable as many hashers as possible to contribute to the difficult work, fully verifying not just blindly rubber-stamping, while accommodating no more transactions, of no less value per transaction, than is absolutely necessary, taking into account the ability to apply that work to as many secondary chains as might turn out to be needed to accomodate any amount of increase in transaction volumes, even all the way down to children buying penny-candy on the latest and leastest secondary chain with its brownie-point coins that kindergartens and homeschoolers worldwide use to incentivise children to learn and teach them how the vast and variegated world of cryptocurrency works and thus to reap transaction fees on as many chains as they choose to scale themselves up to be able to merge all at once.

-MarkM-

For the blocksize limit removal proponents: What are you afraid of?

That you cannot make transactions for basically free anymore? Don't you get it?
The limit is there for a reason... some of which were already mentioned in this thread.

Maybe once we reach the limit there will be finally some steady income for miners (read not related to the initial block reward).
If the limit is reached consistently there would finally be a market for transactions which wasn't there before. You preach free markets and shit, but when it comes down to it you are afraid of them.

I think this is exactly the right thing to do.

There is still the question of what the default behavior should be. Here is a proposal:

Ignore blocks that take your node longer than N seconds to verify.

I'd propose that N be:  60 seconds if you are catching up with the blockchain.  5 seconds if you are all caught-up.  But allow miners/merchants/users to easily change those defaults.

Rationale: we should use time-to-verify as the metric, because everything revolves around the 10-minutes-per-block constant.

Time-to-verify has the nice property of scaling as hardware gets more powerful. Miners will want to create blocks that take a reasonable amount of time to propagate through the network and verify, and will have to weigh "add more transactions to blocks" versus "if I add too many, my block will be ignored by more than half the network."

Time-to-verify also has the nice property of incentivizing miners to broadcast transactions instead of 'hoarding' them, because transactions that are broadcast before they are in a block make the block faster to verify (because of the signature cache). That is good for lots of reasons (early detection of potential double-spends and spreading out the verification work over time so there isn't a blizzard of CPU work that needs to be done every time a block is found, for example).

How far from the lake?
Is there really a nuke plant nearby?

We've come so far from buying a Pizza for 10K BTC. Congrats and I hope you find a buyer!

If the blocksize limit is lifted, and blocks continue to grow without bound, to me the plan seems to be a bait-and-switch, selling people a purportedly decentralized currency that anyone in the world can validate without having to rely on third parties, then pulling the rug out from under them by migrating it to a system where only big businesses able to invest the thousands of dollars required to purchase high-speed network connections and lots of harddrive space can validate blocks.


...and a 1MiB blockchain limit does this. That's 55GiB/year, low enough that anyone will be able to afford the hard-drive space to store a full copy of the block chain for years to come. Anyone will be able to also afford an internet connection, nearly anywhere in the world, with the capacity needed to participate as a full, validating node.

Like it or not we can't have every transaction using Bitcoin on the block chain. We need to develop alternate solutions anyway for small-value transactions, and since we're doing that, why not use those solutions for day-to-day spending and keep the blocksize low enough to keep Bitcoin itself truly decentralized?

My biggest fear is these small-value transaction solutions won't be developed, and instead we'll see pressure to just keep raising the blocksize, losing decentralization each time until Bitcoin is just another PayPal.

You are wrong. There is no voting in Bitcoin. Miners validate.

You don't understand. I use Bitcoin because it is built upon certain principles and built in such a way that those principles can't be "legislated" away with a rule change. If this isn't the case I have no use for Bitcoin.

by properties of bitcoin being eroded you mean people will not be able to get their transactions included in a block with out paying a fee right? This is actually desirable because in the future transaction fees will have to replace block rewards.

As I understand it, Satoshi DID intend to increase the block size, and he intended to do it without a fork.

I think its worth remembering that Satoshi's view ought to get a certain amount of respect just because, he is Satoshi.

Various complex ways of adjusting the blocksize dynamically have been discussed, but mostly these sound too raw to me, and need a much longer period of discussion. The blocksize will likely need to be increased THIS YEAR, or some of the properties of Bitcoin may start to be eroded. Thats the current situation.

I say a moderate hard coded increase should be planned for now (this is not a fork) and more complex proposals FULLY evaluated over the next year or so.

It's also important to note that there are many upgrades that can be done to Bitcoin if a hard fork is needed anyway. It's actually very beneficial. It will allow Bitcoin to stay competitive with smaller and more agile cryptocurrencies.

If the government has deemed raw milk is bad for you and has thus done the honorable thing and protected us from such a danger, then why question it?

We should be coming up with ways to use Bitcoin to reward politicians who pass more laws to protect us from ourselves.

Really? Why do you asy that?

I think we should put users first. What do users want? They want low transaction fees and fast confirmations. Lets design for that case, because THE USERS are who ultimately give Bitcoin value. - Gavin Andersen

Really? Improve it how?

You seem to be saying that we should subsidize inefficient miners by limiting the block size, therefore driving up fees and making users pay for their inefficiency. - Gavin Andersen

Yes, I believe they would. So far, most miners and pools are VERY conservative; I think the idea that they will create huge blocks that have a significant risk of being rejected, just so they MIGHT get an advantage over marginal miners that can't process them fast enough, is loony.

But I might be wrong.

So I'd like to wait a little while, think deeply some more, and see how miners and merchants and users react with the system we've got as transaction volume increases.