I'm in the middle about this.
One the one hand, I do understand the reason for a change like this.
On the other hand, it's not true that doing double-spending 0-conf transactions is trivial now.
So: I don't know. I like the idea of aligning miner's short-term self interest (even if they don't exploit that right now) with the policy implemented by the reference client. But perhaps not immediately...
+1
Ultimately the change is too aggressive and anti-social
right now. Absolutely the miners market may change and make double-spending trivial, but that does not seem to justify removing hope of using a feature that businesses do rely on in the field today.
The userbase uses them, for better or worse.
Gavin wants to go down the same stupid path that the phone systems did. It's understandable why, his salary is paid by the Bitcoin Foundation, which in turn is heavily funded by payment-using non-anonymous companies like bitcoinstore, bitinstant, zipbit, eCardOne, CoinLab etc. etc. Most of these companies are still startups that are burning capital fast, and they need Bitcoin payments to become big NOW NOW NOW. Anything that might delay that could easily put these companies out of business and make their investors lose a lot of money.
[...]
Gavin's other big goal is to get the blocksize limit removed, which makes it impossible to mine on a small scale or anonymously,
This is full of hyperbole and exaggeration, much like the recent
thread on dust. However, it is fair to address the subject on a more reasoned level, because there is a valid point buried in there.
There is definitely a contingent of companies that seemingly want to change the blocksize limit immediately, from 1MB to infinity, to fix "this awful scaling problem" they see. They want to sell the message that bitcoin can scale to Visa/MC levels tomorrow. There should be absolutely no impediment to sending millions of transactions, for fractions of a penny apiece.
We absolutely do want to grow the network and encourage as many bitcoin users to use bitcoin as possible (well, I do at least, and I think Gavin does too)... but one cannot ignore a key attribute conferring by a limit
like the 1MB limit: it encourages engineering efficiencies to be sought. Programmers have an incentive to actively seek ways to reduce the number of transactions, or reduce transaction size, when faced with a limited resource.
Some business models simply don't care about that part of the equation. It's not a conspiracy by Gavin and the Bitcoin Foundation funders, it is simply one facet of some bitcoin businesses. They make money with increased transaction volume. That's fine, but a key economic counter-point is that these businesses are not bearing the costs of the mining/blockchain impact of a million-TX-per-day policy.
Off-chain transactions should handle a resource limitation in a scalable fashion, but no one has good working prototypes. Gavin has rightly pointed out, in Gavin/retep exchanges, that off-chain transactions remain a scalability solution
in theory, while we know for certain that increasing the blocksize limit will enable increased transaction volume.
The danger in following that logic too far is that you de facto eliminate most incentives towards creating an off-chain transaction system/network and related businesses, or really as mentioned above, any need for transactional efficiency. It also has impact on
who is a bitcoin miner, selecting out anonymous miners as jdillon predicts.
I don't think anybody has The Answer right now, and my main preference is to avoid making decisions that dramatically and immediately change bitcoin's economics. $Topic might do that, hurting payment companies for no good reason.
Removing the blocksize limit also injects chaos for unclear value.
Ultimately it is a complicated, zen balance of factors: too-harsh limits, and you potentially choke off bitcoin utility just when it is being adopted, and eliminate some business models. too-lax limits, and you choke off certain technologies, encourage spam, and eliminate some other business models.
My current personal preference for a blocksize limit solution is
for each (144*365) blocks,
limit += 1MB
As that's something that cannot be gamed by miners or payment companies. But most payment companies do indeed react in horror at any impediment to "send as many transactions as possible."
Definitely in the middle here too. Not as aggressive as Gavin or Mike Hearn, but not as conservative as "1MB forever" people either. 1MB was clearly a temporary solution. (that does not imply simply removing it is without negative impact)
If the answer isn't clear, and the system isn't broken right now, err on the side of doing nothing. The answer was clear, with the recent data spam / dust changes. Not clear at all, with blocksize limits and the impact on fees thereof.
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