If there is excess space, there is someone somewhere who will try to use it to store their data... be it some outlawed pornography they want to try to make censorship resistant or just 0 BTC  payments to advertise to people. A single while loop is an effectively infinite capacity demand, and a price of zero thats what we would have.

  There have been a half dozen attempted companies trying to do "data archival in the blockchain", yadda yadda-- turns out globally replicated storage that other people pay for is pretty attractive!.   Though the traditional hard limit isn't necessary to block out crap like the unsolicited commercial advertising, but I'm personally very uncomfortable with putting ourselves in the position where the health of the network depends on miners censoring transactions-- I much prefer the politically neutral economics of competing for the available resources with fees.

LOL. Present it to Gavin?  You realize that Gavin hasn't actually tendered a specific proposal-- it's all talk and political maneuvering with the general public, right?  No BIP draft, no pull request, no development thread (except for the one created days after by opponents of his move in shock by the approach). As far as I can tell the whole situation was specifically constructed to be a big show and justify a "governance" crisis and land-grab (a belief also supported by the emails Mike was sending the gmx account a year ago). That noise about the XT hardfork?  No commits on the repository for months, and except for two patches even the months old stuff is just copying Bitcoin Core-- the work of all these other people who are so easily disrespected now. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Meanwhile, beyond making proposals, creating simulations, oh yea and developing bunch of highly useful new free software for Bitcoin, the rest of the people who actually do the work continuing to truck on.  In any case-- these things have been proposed in the usual forums. Gavin seems unwilling to consider anything other than a massive uncontrolled jump in blocksize as far as I can tell, fortunately Jeff isn't interested in the same kind of purely political end run.

And here again we find that you say something untrue (that I hadn't made proposals related to block size), it's corrected (no, in fact I've tried several specific proposals), then the bar moves.

Yes, you cannot be simpler than changing a constant-- but as I pointed out, changing a constant is no measure of safety, correctness, or ethics. There are plenty of one character changes that would utterly destroy the system if adopted.

And contrary to your claim, I've proposed many things--- even going back some time. For example, adjusting the limit to respect the impact on UTXO so that the costs better match the actual costs; adjusting blocks based on the 33rd percentile of miner preferences (similar to Jeff's proposal of 25th percentile), and allowing miners to mine blocks over the limit quadratically with increased effective-difficulty-- so if the network is actually backlogged with fees miners can catch up without being completely unhinged.

And then there is all the separate fundamental scaling work which I originally proposed, like the whole notion of UTXOs as a separately tracked and commutable resource, fraud proofs, etc.

Huh?  Dunno what you're talking about there!  The network has been running flawlessly.  While we're sure there are, no doubt, lots of issues-- as we optimized for adding interesting features instead of QA-- and you really really really shouldn't go create an altcoin out of it (because it will crash and burn and we will laugh)... it works quite well, and I'm not aware of any complaints to the contrary.    Are you unable to exit FUD-everything-gmaxwell-touches mode for even a moment?

Thanks. There are a couple of other angles that I think more people will be excited about once they 'click' for them.

Tying the subjects together-- for a given state of technology and amount of extra capacity (be it bandwidth, cpu, etc.) that capacity can be spent in various ways, by taking on increased load, by improving fungibility or privacy, by increasing decentralization. I happen to think we need all of these things. But a simplified understanding that only looks at one dimension isn't going to come up with a good engineering conclusion.  And sure, more X sound great if you consider it in isolation, but perhaps not when you realize it means less Y and never gaining any Z.  One of the reasons I think it's important to be cautious here is so that we can have CT (or a superior successor technology) in the Bitcoin network and not just in a sidechain.

The opposition to Gavin's 2000% jump proposal comes unanimously from every active technical contributor to Bitcoin Core who has spoken up. This should suggest to you that your understanding of the comparative basis likely miscalibrated.  Though there is no comparative basis, 2WP sidechains are something that just requires non-broken smart contracts, it's not something that needs a hard-fork (and the centralized fedpeg sidechain stuff is indistinguishable, uncensorable, and unblockable: you can't prevent people from using it no matter how much you think you should be able to tell them that they can manage their funds).

Considering how often cypherdoc brags about his thread here being filled with economic wisdom, it's surprising to see views like "changing a constant simple and safe", after all 21 million bitcoins is merely a constant (and, pedantically, one the system didn't originally enforce....).  Try another strawman.
 

I hate the fact that politics must be played.  But after this debacle, sidechains had better be more awesome than the second coming of Satoshi if they want to make mods that are so much more complicated than changing a constant that there is simply no comparative basis.

My guess is that they want to delay blocksize so they can cram sidechain mods into the same fork as a negotiated compromise.  But this is turning into a huge mistake.  They are burning all the goodwill they had, and making us suspect them of not wanting what's best for bitcoin.  This reputation is going to badly affect their ability to get consensus in the future.

This is fantastic news. Jeff is the one person who can push the 1MBers in Core Dev into a reasonable compromise.
Together with the Greek slow-motion Inception-style trainwreck finally off the rails...
...BITCOIN on the launchpad at $230.
UP!

Nah they will prob raise rates before intervention. That will blow top off of stocks.