I think calling the amounts "unspendable" is not technically correct - provided an unspent output is old enough even one that contains a single Satoshi can be spent (at least that is the case currently AFAIA).

As it was cloned from Bitcoin one would expect so (as presumably would be the case for all other clone coins).

By average hardware I am talking about an average spec. dual-core laptop with around 10 GB of available free disk space.

Since version 0.8.0 the hardware is coping with processing blocks fine (it was freezing the computer all the time with previous versions) and the disk space should last another few years or so (at the current rate).

If the blocks were to double or more in size then I estimate that it could be likely that before the end of the year either I would have to either upgrade my hardware or stop running the current Satoshi client.

BTW - I don't believe the problem is unsolvable and of course I do expect to upgrade my hardware within a few years.

Well it seems that this thread is starting to contain more heat than light.

If 2 includes 1 then no real difference - understand that a large % of all tx's *are* SD - my point being that there simply isn't any other significant spam tx's to block (as of today).

True - but filling the blockchain with spam messages (i.e. dust tx's that just tell the player that they *lost*) hardly seems in the spirit of Bitcoin either.

We do not have blockchain bloat due to *all tx's with more than 13 inputs or tx's below 0.0002x* but we *do* have blockchain bloat due to SD (i.e. the source of the current soft limit needing to be raised is just them).

Of course if SD would like to buy me a new hard drive then I would be more than happy for the (hard) limit to be increased just for them.

I don't see anything from Satoshi in that link at all (a bunch of other people some of which are quoting him) and if he did think 100 GB of blocks per day were going to occur I don't think he would have thought that to be feasible in 2013 (or even by 2020).

Well thanks for being the "spokesperson" for everyone here but I think you'll find that quite a few people disagree and if Satoshi really had planned for Bitcoin to be a tx system to compete with the likes of Paypal/Visa then you don't think he might have made a mistake or two (if not then why does this very thread exist)?

Yeah - his "Pinball Construction Set" actually pre-dated the Mac (not sure if he visited Palo Alto like Apple did)!

So you are saying that Gold tx's are > 7 per second (just trying to work out what the *real* problem is)?

Any of you guys ever heard of Bill Budge?

I actually was sent 6502 assembly source code from him back in the 80's when I was hoping to become the next "him" writing arcade games for the Apple ][.

Shit - I remember using CompuServe also (and the sounds of my original 1200 baud modem)!

Interesting I am 45+ but had forgotten the Unix to Unix "copy" abbreviation (was that from the usenet days?).

Do people trading Gold need more than 7 tx's per second?

(i.e. do you think Bitcoin would really *die* if that was the limit?)

I never said tx's don't matter and if tx's fell to 0 then Bitcoin would die - the question is whether it really has been designed to compete with Paypal/Visa for that purpose.

(it's not an argument of extremes I am trying to make at all)

Again why?

If # of tx's was the #1 priority then why would you even have a 10 minute confirmation time?

And why bother with even having a 21M limit if all that mattered was the # of tx's?

Why?

The *solution* is at this stage very unclear (thus all the threads about this issue).

Understand that if the max. block size were simply abolished then apart from it being a hard-fork (equals Bitcoin turns into BitcoinA, BitcoinB, etc.) the likelihood of people with average hardware (myself included) deciding to keep using the Satoshi client (i.e. full block chain stored on your hardware) will dramatically be reduced (if it were to grow 10x the size in the next few months I would most likely opt out of doing this).

Understand that also most so-called *miners* are actually just *hashers* (they don't *need* the block chain) - so a likely outcome of an unlimited block size would be that mostly only the *pools* would have the entire block chain (everyone else would end up using lightweight clients).

If this occurred then the entire "decentralisation" of Bitcoin would actually be at risk and this is the *real* problem that needs to be worked out (rather than arguing about the legitimacy or otherwise of SD tx's).

Cheers and welcome to Bitcointalk (do mind the trolls)!