Don't be silly.  Satoshi knew darn well that one or more hard forks to address scalability would eventually be needed.  He said so back in 2008-2009. 

For the people who think exponential growth is NOT a good model for this, I'd like to point out something.... 

Oh, come on.  You knew someone would have the domain name, didn't you? 

Pretty much every word in English is a domain name now.  And, yes, that includes Lucifer.

I think I have an idea for a better way to do it.  Let's say an altcoin fixes its sights on some long-term rate of currency supply inflation, say 10%.  

They start bootstrapping by awarding 1 coin to the miner per block, for Proof-of-work, and never stop or reduce this amount.

Additionally, whenever someone actually makes a transaction, the age of the inputs used is applied and 10% compounded annually is added to the block; 1% annual for the coin age, or 1 month's interest, whichever's more, as a tx fee for the miner, and the rest back to the payer in the transaction.  This includes coinbase transactions:  The miner can turn over whatever inputs he likes, and get 10% annual-rate interest for them paid along with his block.

The "score" or basis of competition of blocks for proof-of-work purposes is the actual proof-of-work, plus some factor multiplied by the amount of interest being awarded in that block;  So the miner who includes all transactions, and is also turning over a lot of his own old unspent txouts, needs to meet a lower threshold for proof-of-work to get a block, than a miner who leaves out transactions or who is using no stake to mine.

Over time, the interest awards and tx fees dominate the 1 coin per block award, until eventually the 1 coin per block is negligible relative to the currency supply and the currency inflation converges on 10%.  The amount of resources that it's worth spending per block for mining very slowly converges on being proportional to 1 months' interest (at 10% annual) on the txouts spent per block.

Because everybody is motivated to turn over their currency frequently, and the blocks with larger interest payments are strongly preferred, a version of TAPS or Transactions-As-Proof-Of-Stake, becomes viable.   Preferring chains on the same basis as preferring blocks (proof-of-work plus the same factor times interest awarded) should rapidly converge on blocks representing the greatest fraction of the money supply, with older txouts counting more.  An absolute "lock point" beyond which no reorg could ever go, could occur as little as 24 hours in the past in a healthy economy where the money is moving fairly fast.

Overall, the reward for mining would grow very slowly, with no "extra" to reward early miners.  And the incentive to mine would likely never justify the kind of giant hashing farms we see with Bitcoin.  Conversely, someone who does devote massive hashing power to it, especially in early days when the interest awards aren't very important yet in picking which chain to go with, could make attacks fairly easily, because the justification for investment for honest miners wouldn't be very high.

Not.  Satoshi was never a human.  Satoshi was a pseudonym.  It got used to do something important, and that thing is done.  That is the beginning and end of Satoshi's "pure nature." 

There would be no benefit and great potential for harm to the creator of Bitcoin if he were to ever use "Satoshi" again, and he is not stupid.  Therefore he will never use it again.

Interesting.  I had no idea, and I've BEEN working with financial data. 

Pretty much everything I've seen has used SI prefixes here in the US.  On the (rare) occasions where I've seen 'M' used to mean thousands I've briefly wondered whether it was a typo or a deliberate misstatement, but since the truth was clear enough for other reasons in those particular documents, never pursued it.

Anyway, I'm sticking with SI prefixes in everything I write.  It's the nearly-universal standard now and the sooner everybody stops using everything else the less confusion we'll have.  But now that I know some people have learned an obsolete system that will cause them to misinterpret SI prefixes, I'll at least make a footnote that says so.

It's a simple matter of having the miner send one (or more) of his unspent txouts to a new txout -- which he also controls, of course.  He can even put in a generous tx fee -- because he's the miner and he'll collect it.  They won't cost him anything even if another miner gets the block.  The other  miner hasn't heard about them yet (because the guy bloating blocks didn't broadcast them), hence the attacker won't even owe any tx fees. 

So, yes, in principle a miner can bloat a block with as many bogus transactions as he wants, it won't cost him a darn thing to do so beyond the possibility that his huge block broadcasts more slowly and gets orphaned, and there's really not much anybody can do to stop him. 

"Only invest what you can afford to lose" applies just as well to any complete technology as it does to something that's still in beta. 

Remember, Bitcoin is the initial implementation of a protocol.  Even if Bitcoin is a mature technology and no longer experimental, you should still invest only what you can afford to lose, because some other implementation of the protocol (yes, an altcoin) may eventually be the one that businesses settle on as being friendlier to their interests. 

I think that miners will eventually be supported by TX fees, but right now our TX fee structure is probably wrong for it.

TX fees are what we pay the miners to maintain security on the chain.  They do this mainly by making a major investment in hashing power.  When Bitcoin got started the resources required to do mining were mainly bandwidth and storage space for the blockchain, because CPU power was assumed to be widely if unevenly distributed. Accordingly the tx fees were set according to the amount of bandwidth and storage space a tx required -- that is, the transaction size in bits, because the cost of mining was assumed at the time to be proportional to bandwidth and storage required.  

But ASICs changed the world.  The bandwidth and storage space required to do mining is now essentially irrelevant as regards the expense of mining.  People with the bandwidth and storage can't mine effectively in competition with ASIC farms.  The major expense of mining is now dedicated hashing hardware, not bandwidth or storage.  If we want to charge what a transaction costs the network to secure, TX size is no longer an accurate measure of anything.  

Ultimately, what secures the blockchain now is sheer dedicated hashing hardware.  The question is how much of it we want to buy -- indeed, how much we will economically cause to be manufactured -- in order to secure the chain.

I think that we need security proportional to the value of the transactions secured.  Therefore if we're going to charge tx fees for security, we need tx fees proportional to the amount of bitcoin sent.  The charge for tx size in bits (bandwidth and storage) should be high enough to keep "dust" out of the chain, but if we want security proportional to the amount secured, the main source of tx fees should probably be charged for the tx size measured in bitcoins, not in bits.

The number of tx per second (and the amount of storage required) is limited by two things; block size and block frequency.  We could double tx per second by doubling blocksize or by doubling block frequency.   Or we could do both and quadruple it.  Of course if we doubled block frequency we'd need to halve block rewards to stay on the same money supply curve.

A lot of the motivation for the 1MB limit was a fear that if it weren't limited we'd have people building gigantic blocks just to clog up the system.  If someone with major hashing power started building giant blocks every time he got a block, he  could DoS the system just by making the block chain too large for most people to store. 

A lot of the motivation for the ten-minute intervals was limiting the amount of storage devoted to block headers.

Well, you can believe your uncle that Satoshi's real identity will never be revealed.  I think that's definitely true. 

Beyond that, I'm glad you found the passage relevant.  Although I'm still not sure what it has to do with the question you asked, and I think it's good as philosophy and poetry of a sort rather than believing it as literal truth myself, I felt that it is somehow relevant. 

I'm going to preface this by saying I'm not religious any more, although there are religious people and philosophies which I still deeply respect.  I was born into a minority Christian sect which I am now estranged from. 

Here's what I learned, when I was very young, about Shaitan (whom most of Christianity calls Satan).  It was only considerably later that I began to question it, and discovered that it's not what everyone else learned.  I don't know whether or not it is relevant to the current discussion, but it's at least an interesting view of the conflict between God and Satan that very few have heard. 

Hum.  I am completely unable to find this text in any computer-readable format anywhere.  I guess I'll have to type it in.

This one hits uncanny valley for me.  She looks almost human, in a creepy way.  It's probably the makeup.

This.  *EXACTLY* this.  I said this three pages ago and the responding silence was deafening.  Come on guys, this is a REALLY good idea, and needs a response. 

I think this patch is probably a good idea.  I have no idea how to get community support for it though. 

So, the limit is defined in main.h, line 42.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/5505a1b13f75af9f0f6421b42d97c06e079db345/src/main.h#L42

And the test is done at main.cpp at line 727.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/3222802ea11053f0dd69c99fc2f33edff554dc17/src/main.cpp#L727

So this looks like a very simple change. 

Is there any way for someone to play sillybuggers right around the transition period?  With the main chain and other chains at different heights, can the client ever be in a state where it's willing to accept larger blocks in one chain, or unwilling to accept larger blocks in one chain, due to the block height of some different chain?

Satoshi is worth almost half a BILLION now.  You really think he's coming out for a book deal "in excess of a million"?

fixed again.   

Now that I think of it, we did talk about the floating point format in that discussion.  8-decimal divisibility was the maximum Satoshi would consider, for that reason (although he was a fanatic about doing everything with unsigned integers).   Hal's point about the smallest division being less than a penny, and that being possible even if the whole world's money supply were denominated in Bitcoin, meant no extraordinary measures were necessary.  

One thing I learned, was that in C, numeric overflow is undefined behavior on signed integers, and some compilers (notably gcc, which Satoshi was using) will even eliminate overflow checks, and then drop any error handlers or commands to output debug messages as dead code.  Which is a reason why Satoshi was such a fanatic about using unsigned integers everywhere.  

IOW, if you check for overflow by writing code like

int a,b, c;
.....a and b acquire values ....
if (a > 0 && b > 0 && a+b <= 0) {
errprintf("integer overflow at checkpoint 232\n");
halt(-1);
}
c = a+b;

gcc will eliminate the whole clause because, in its tiny little brain, integer overflow is undefined behavior so it can do whatever it likes with programming statements that depend on integer overflow having semantics.  And since it's trying to make the code shorter, faster, and less complicated, it just drops 'em.

But if you check for overflow by writing
unsigned int a,b,c;
.... a and b acquire values ....
if (a+b < b || a+b < a) {
errprintf("unsigned integer overflow at checkpoint 233\n");
halt(-1);
}
c = a+b;

gcc will actually output the code to do that, because unsigned integers are specified as having modular addition and subtraction so it can't replace the if condition with if(0) and then drop the whole thing.

Not that I ever saw such baroque error checking in the Bitcoin code.

Yes, I believe that they have.  I hope that they have done so correctly and without making business plans involving malign intent. 



Sure.  Terrorist wants to spread chaos and make a profit to arm and equip his jihadis.  He acquires massive hashing infrastructure which miners are getting rid of on a secondary market like ebay for cheap, shorts Bitcoin with sixty-day contracts, and starts doing double spends of large amounts, forcing orphaning of chains hours or even days deep.  This will attract media attention and shatter confidence in Bitcoin security, as well as inspiring people to wait longer and longer and let the blockchain get days deep before they consider a payment secure, so he gets profits from his double spends, a huge payback on his short, and as a bonus, strikes a blow against the capitalist swine by destroying the value of their Bitcoin.