[2015-06-16] FT: Bitcoin Opec favours 8MB blocksize increase

[Grand_Voyageur]

Bitcoin Opec favours 8MB blocksize increase

Bitcoin wants to grow. Sadly, because the Bitcoin protocol restricts the size of every block mined on the network to 1MB, it can’t scale easily. There’s a limited amount of transactions/data that can be consolidated into every block, which creates something of an artificial scarcity problem.

Some maintain good old fashioned capitalism can resolve the problem. If there’s a limit, people who want to transact quickly should pay to have their transactions/data prioritised in the chain.

Miners, especially those having a tough time covering their costs these days, favour this approach. Their view is that the sooner block size is restricted, the sooner the market will be able to find a true value for bitcoin transactions. Also, it’s not healthy for the miner network to depend on speculative inflows forever. True miner revenue would be like giving bitcoin a proper business model. It might also help eliminate blockchain spamming and free-loading.

Full story: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/06/16/2132043/bitcoin-opec-favours-8mb-blocksize-increase/

[Buttknuckle]

I don't completely disagree but if the transaction fee goes up too much then there is really not any advantage over traditional payments like credit cards and paypal.  I think that higher transaction volume, and thus a larger block size is preferable to increasing the fees.  Or at least increasing the fees substantially.