I like it!

1) If block size is increased anywhere up to 10 MB, I will still run a full node on my home computer.  Beyond that, I may not be able to. At least with today's technology, anyway.
2) Mining pools would not be affected by such a change.  They would (appropriately so) balance the size of a block with the transaction fees that make up said block.  They would likely not accept any free transactions, but fees even lower than the default might be ok in some cases.  It'll come down to the balance of the potential cost of an orphaned block vs the transaction fees that make up said block.  Most blocks would likely be far below a 10 MB limit for quite some time.
3) People who cannot handle 10 MB blocks (around 520GB/year at the MAX, but in reality and for now, much smaller than that) should not run full nodes.  This is not a problem - as long as at least SOME people run full nodes, the rest of us are protected.  Those who really believe that additional decentralization is necessary should be willing to pay for it.  I am.  It's only $25/year to buy a new 2TB drive every four years, and it'll only keep getting cheaper (unless another freak flood shows up).
4) I would encourage an increase in the block size because it is beneficial to miners and beneficial to those who wish to make transactions.  It is only not beneficial to those who wish to run full nodes, but certainly, it would not put it entirely out of the reach of them.

wizkid, are you going to distribute this large fee once you get the code working, or attempt to return it to the owner, or keep it as part of the pool's funding?

0.0005 fee x 2,000,000,000,000 bytes / 500 bytes (average per tx) = 2,000,000 BTC in fees paid to fill up a 2 TB hard drive.

$80M would buy a lot of 2TB hard drives.

Funny, I was just thinking about this today as well... I still have 12 BTC hung up there.  :\

Why do "normal" users deserve to use the network more cheaply than Satoshi Dice users?  They're both using the same resources.  But this is more of a point of opinion than anything.

If any individual miner or pool agrees with Luke-Jr, then the solution for them is simple: Set their miners or pools to only accept SD transactions which meet whatever arbitrary criteria they believe is fair.  Maybe this is a higher fee, in which case they should notify SD of the change, so that SD can choose whether to pay a higher fee to be included in their blocks.  Maybe this is the belief that SD is the scum of the earth, and they will never process SD transactions.  That's ok too - it is entirely their decision.  The rest of the miners will continue to set other arbitrary rules for what transactions are accepted or denied when they hit a block.

They are paying exactly what miners require.  If you want them to pay more, then miners have to require more.

You're kind of getting to the same point, just from a different direction.

The fact is, miners can choose to to do whatever the heck they want.  Which is exactly what you said, and exactly why I am glad that Satoshi Dice has been doing what it has been doing, because it will begin forcing miners to care about what transactions they include and what transactions they do not include, and whether they want to increase the soft limit or hard limit on block sizes, etc.  It will force users of Bitcoin to decide whether they want to include fees and how large of a fee to include, and it'll force clients to give users more flexibility in whether they choose to include a fee or not and how large that fee should be.  And while we can sit in this thread all day discussing the best course of action, it is ultimately entirely in the power of each individual to decide what is best for them to do.

In other words, SD is forcing us to face the growing pains of Bitcoin.  The GROWING pains.

I like it.  It'll mean a more mature and usable Bitcoin down the road.

I'll sell you my first-day preorder for 10x that amount.

A big thumbs-up to this post!

Ideally, I'd like to have a solution that works for all the users of my sites regardless of what browser they are using.

...which sucks, because it takes 20 seconds to load a single page on my websites that use it.

Web coders out there:  Is there any way for me to skip the loading of an image and resume loading the rest of the page if the image is taking more than X number of seconds?  I suppose such a thing could be a failsafe in the event of operation fabulous going down for any reason.

Indeed... fascinating to watch the interaction.

Not really.  Day traders are going to trade on the exchange with the consistently lowest spread.  Because MtGox is the most used exchange, it'll have the lowest spread.  And because it has the lowest spread, it is the most used exchange.

Exchanges already exist with fees below MtGox, but they aren't as successful, because they all have various problems.  Bitfloor was hacked and not smart with security.  Coinbase has issues with downtime.  Most other exchanges aren't available for one particular main currency or another - MtGox has the most world-wide currencies supported AFAIK.

MtGox isn't nearly as good as it could be, but nothing better has yet presented itself.

Thanks.  Looks like they deleted the thread sometime before June.  The original post is forever saved though:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110428230202/http://www.overclock.net/other-software/1001123-earn-your-gpu-bitcoin-mining-guide.html

I know in late April 2011, there was a huge long thread about Bitcoin on Overclock.net, I think stemming from a news article that was posted.  That's how I heard about it.  The mods eventually locked the thread and, for a time, banished people from talking about Bitcoin at all (wtf?), but the thread had reached thousands of replies and over a hundred pages by then.  So that launched a lot of sudden interest into Bitcoin.  I can't even find the thread anymore - it may have been deleted.

Anyway, with that sudden increase in interest of Bitcoin mining (hey, you have tens of thousands of computer enthusiasts who just heard about it for the first time), they start jabbering away about it, even wanting to buy some, etc.  Some news outfits heard about it and wanted to write about it.  And it snowballed from there.

At least, that's what I believe happened with it.

Exactly this.

For everyone sending transactions, start putting fees in them HIGHER than whatever SatoshiDice is paying.  This would relegate SD transactions to be the least-prioritized transactions on the network, and they would only fill up the remainder of blocks after all of the more "legitimate" transactions have been processed

That said, we will eventually need to be increasing block sizes, so why not start now?  I completely agree that the network needs to be able to handle more transactions to go "mainstream", and I think we should begin planning based on what current hardware can handle, not on an arbitrary limit that we think will be enough.

Currently, the network at 1 MB per block can create about 52 GB of blockchain data in a year.  I'm not sure about the rest of you, but that amount is certainly feasible for me to store indefinitely.  A 2 TB drive can be had for $99.  That'll store 19 years of data, so less than $6/year to store the blockchain.  Is that really so unreasonable?

So say we increase the maximum block size to 5 MB per block.  That would create up to 260GB of blockchain data in a year.  Again, a 2 TB drive would store 7 years of data for $99.  So that's what, $12 or $13 a year?

Now certainly, there is no monetary compensation or incentive for people to choose to store the whole blockchain, and I don't expect many people to do so regardless of what block size is ultimately chosen.  But those who are interested in maintaining Bitcoin's integrity as a decentralized currency certainly will, and will definitely be willing to spend a token amount ($12-$13 a year) to maintain their Bitcoins' value.

Then you honestly don't deserve a penny of it back.

Why not just set up a poll thread for this?

Haven't heard this news yet... how big is WinPoker?  Are they the company that Gambling911 was talking about?