a link to https://bitcoin.org would seem appropriate, and useful to anyone who follows it up.

The primary argument to retain the 1MB limit is that smaller blocks helps ensure decentralization of Bitcoin. Lots of people rightly care about this.

As the average block size has increased the number of full nodes has been steadily declining. Once decentralization is lost then it is unlikely to be recovered. So this is a one-way path when changes are made which put decentralization at risk. The number of full nodes is in flux as they keep coming and going. Maybe there are about 8,000 at any one time. Ideally, this should not drop too low.  So, there is a trade-off between average block size and the number of full nodes. No one knows the whether there is a tipping point where a certain block size might suddenly cause a lot of nodes to disappear because of the volume of traffic. Consumer bandwidth is the key limiting factor.

The best way to keep blocks small is via fees, and the minimum fee was increased 1 year ago which got rid of a lot of the messaging spam which had tx volumes at >60k per day early in 2013. So fee increases have already allowed the block limit to remain longer than previously expected. The block limit has a use for its psychological effect of driving the fees market, competition for block space. The problem there is that the fees market may not work smoothly until the block reward is 6.25 or even 3.125 btc.

However, a fixed block limit is very dangerous because of the potential for ecosystem conditions to create a sudden volume spike into this bottleneck crippling transaction throughput, collapse the price and create a PR disaster which will hang like a cloud for years afterwards.

IMHO, at the very least the 1MB should increase in line with the global improvement in bandwidth speed, and should be about 3MB by now.
This can be done using block version numbers and a super-majority trigger, or the more primitive block height check. However, time is running out and it looks like the 1MB will be maxed out during Q2 2015.

Does anyone really think it is a good idea to entrench centralized mining even further into Bitcoin? Short memories or are ghash and discus-fish good-ole-boy pillars of the community now?

It would be better if the main companies, which rely on Bitcoin for their business model, were to invest in improving decentralized mining (like p2pool) and ensure that their transaction flow benefits that area instead.

Looks like the volume-pumping willy-bot on OK Coin is switched off.

You are assuming a functional fees market exists. This is not yet the case. Most miners are simply selling hashing power into pools. Basically, only a handful of pool owners can define X, and they don't want to constantly play with variables. They want to set up an optimized mining operation and let it run.


This isn't about micro-tx. The fee structure change a year ago already made micro-tx non-viable, and push it off-chain. This is good.
The problem is that the block size limit is simply too small for Bitcoin to maintain reasonable growth, and it will hit a bottleneck just trying to process normal business.

Looking back at the March 2013 temporary fork event, a long time afterwards, it occurred to me that it may have been a major driver in the $266 spike (the Cyprus situation being irrelevant). The reason is that for many non-technical people the fork "proved" that Bitcoin was truly a breakthrough in software - not a clever scam. The fact that it could have a technical glitch and people from all over the ecosystem rushed to fix it, publicly on IRC, also proved that it is an honest enterprise.

However, this is a one-off proof of legitimacy. Similar events will be very damaging. There are hundreds of alt-coins of many types waiting for Bitcoin to shoot itself in the foot. Bitcoin's value is reasonably steady now and very much buoyed from its first-mover status - and its technical stability when viewed by the public. This is not something which should be thrown away because of analysis paralysis over the 1MB.

gmaxwell makes clear that this subject has been debated in many threads. It keeps getting raised, and the reason is that 18 months have passed since Jeweller's thread, and there is probably less than 18 months until the block size limit starts crippling transaction flows, just as the 250KB soft-limit did early in March 2013.


Satoshi put the 1MB into place nearly 4 years ago, mainly as an anti-spam measure. Now the block limit exists, at the very minimum it should be increasing at the same rate as the average global internet broadband speed.

UK consumer broadband (download) average speed each year


It is a reasonable assumption that all major countries which host bitcoin nodes have seen a similar growth pattern, and upload speeds also follow the pattern.
So, since the 1MB max block size was acceptable, within the goal of maintaining decentralization, in 2010, then 3MB must be acceptable today.

Large blocks are already being created, as a matter of course, by different miners:

313377 298 3,178.83 BTC 5.9.24.81 731.56
313376 1230 3,322.72 BTC Eligius 877.88
313375 1447 2,434.47 BTC Unknown with 1AcAj9p Address 731.47
313374 1897 5,733.43 BTC GHash.IO 731.61

The bare minimum which needs doing is like:
if block height > 330000
   maxblocksize = 3MB [and recalculate dependent variables]

Or better still a flexible limit based upon demand. Remember people are paying for their transactions to be processed:

A set of 2016 blocks is a large number, representative of real bitcoin usage, so a flexible limit determined at each difficulty change makes sense.
The fees market (which is still dsyfunctional) is a lesser concern at the present time.

Bitcoin Core version 0.8 focused on LevelDB, 0.9 on Payment protocol. Version 0.10 really needs to address the block size.

It is crazy to allow the scenario (below) to happen over the 1MB constant when all nodes, not just miners, would be affected:

Well done Meni.

You should turn your screen upside-down. Be rich in no time.

Debt defaults are good for fiat currencies because bankruptcy is the cleansing mechanism of fractional reserve banking. In the case of sovereign debt there are different scenarios based upon whether the debt is in domestic or foreign currency. Argentina has shown that it will print any amount of pesos to pay off government and financial sector debts - denominated in pesos. The problem here is that it owes dollars and can't print them. The Federal Reserve can print dollars, and could bail out Argentina, just has it has done many stealth bailouts of foreign institutions since 2007/8.

tldr; if the Fed prints dollars to bail out Argentina then this is good for Bitcoin. Argentina defaulting shows this is not happening, so should be btc neutral.

Is this the massacre of the leveraged longs?

Exactly. They filed their paperwork and so CH issued the revised notice.

The UK Companies House is run by a bunch of Nazis who think that limited company directors are enemies of the state. For this reason they always include threats with their letters and reminders. They threaten directors with multi-thousand pound fines, imprisonment, and striking a company off if some pathetic form is not filled in on time.

It looks like Bitstamp needs a more efficient company secretary who keeps Companies House information filed on time.

None of the above.

He's an indefatigable fudster who can't stand to see other people grow rich when he was too late to get in before the train choo choo'd.

Nothing like another euro-banking crisis to add some fuel to the fire.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-18/holding-company-portugals-2nd-largest-bank-just-filed-bankruptcy-protection

Unlike March 2013 when few Cypriots were aware of Bitcoin, the safe-haven meme should have spread much further within Portugal by now.

That was a glitch in the Matrix, happens occasionally...

we need a tl;dr for the tl;dr...

also, if the OP has given up on bitcoin then why not go to another forum entirely, maybe PayPalTalk or VisaTalk where so much must be happening that he approves of?

Anyone who submits a formal comment about the proposals on the NYS Register site.

The draft NY regulations are following the classic negotiating strategy of demanding everything, later conceding a few things, then eventually getting more than originally expected. Most (all?) of the feedback will want to rein in the original proposals. The real news will be how much this document is watered down before the final version appears in a few months.

As other posters have pointed out, Bitcoin will not go to the moon without a regulatory framework which major companies feel they can work within. If the regulations are too harsh and stupid then NY will definitely lose the digital currency initiative to many other more appealing jurisdictions: California, Texas, or Europe etc.

Is there more than one Jorge??