The block limit will be raised. There are just no ifs or buts...

[DannyHamilton]

. . . so that I can quietly and quickly mine the rest of the coins on the original chain . . .

This is impossible.  You need to spend some time learning how bitcoin works.  It will take approximately 140 years to mine all the bitcoin on the old chain.  That is true if you are the only miner, or if every person on the planet runs a 100 THz ASIC.

[rebuilder]

OP, please clarify: by "block limit", do you mean block size limit or the maximum number of blocks in which new bitcoins will be generated?

[DannyHamilton]

If the new chain is so huge that Big Brother can easily find its nodes, and/or so big that grassroots activists cannot use it without putting their machines into Big Brother's deep-disk-inspected datacentres, maybe on Big Brother's back-doors-built-into-firmware machines, then the whole point of a grass roots, alternative currency is undermined, possibly Silk Road might somehow manage to run it without being taken down but oppressed groups in terrorist/dictaroship regimes that don't have drug money to finance them might be dead in or out of the water. Moving to the new chain might be literal suicide, the cause of torture and execution of friends and loved ones ("co-conspirators", "fellow enemies of the state", etc).

-MarkM-

And this is true even if we don't change the blocksize.  You are so worried about the bandwidth resource issue, but don't care about the electricity resource issue?

[DannyHamilton]

OP, please clarify: by "block limit", do you mean block size limit or the maximum number of blocks in which new bitcoins will be generated?

The answer to this question seems obvious:

. . . wants the block limit raised, last I checked. Now if his users value a limited block size . . .

[markm]

You are so worried about the bandwidth resource issue, but don't care about the electricity resource issue?

Oh our freedom fighters are to mine too then, eh? Hmm, I wonder, that is what, supposedly, 80 to 120 watts per 60 gigahash/sec?

Actually their mining gear doesn't maybe need much bandwidth, as they just receive block headers and long poll callbacks and return a nonce, so they can keep one in each home or something. It is verifying the blocks and getting solved ones out to the world soon enough to not be orphaned that needs bandwidth.  Which is unfortunate in a way for some folks because ignorant masses of miners can easily be convinced to blindly trust some pool or other, not caring what the heck their hashes are really being used for just as long as they get paid.

-MarkM-

[ArticMine]

Bandwidth has already dropped close to 80% in price in the four years since Bitcoin started and is expected by industry analysts to keep dropping likely at a faster rate. http://www.telegeography.com/products/commsupdate/articles/2012/08/02/ip-transit-price-declines-steepen/ I can purchase today an Internet plan with 1TB of data delivered to my home each month (approximately what would be required to accommodate 1/3 of VISA's transactions over the blockchain) today for 349 CAD a month. In a few years this will likly drop to well under 100 CAD and with even more bandwidth. The idea that allowing Bitcoin to scale so that it is useful for a significant portion of the world's will free out the destroys the distributed nature of Bitcoin is simply false.

[markm]

Yeah. It is mostly the "lets have no limit at all" and "lets have no limit all just automation that looks at some numbers miners or spammers or someone can manipulate and blindly reacts to those on autopilot as if the authors of the autopilot algorithm actually knew how best to central-plan the navigation of such tricky waters as those someone can manipulate" ideas that bother me.

They seem to kind of amount to "lets invite all supervillians to come do their worst", whereas the hard coded hard limit seems more like "no matter what the supervillians do, they will never be able to smack down the common grassroots home bitcoiner".

However the "lets multiply by ten in one jump" also seems bad. If ten times the size won't be needed for five years doubling every year would be smoother yet would get us to larger than that sooner; it'd just do it in steps instead of boom its death of Joe Sixminer day today, the block number for his doom is here.

-MarkM-

[DannyHamilton]

You are so worried about the bandwidth resource issue, but don't care about the electricity resource issue?

Oh our freedom fighters are to mine too then, eh? Hmm, I wonder, that is what, supposedly, 80 to 120 watts per 60 gigahash/sec?

Actually their mining gear doesn't maybe need much bandwidth, as they just receive block headers and long poll callbacks and return a nonce, so they can keep one in each home or something. It is verifying the blocks and getting solved ones out to the world soon enough to not be orphaned that needs bandwidth.  Which is unfortunate in a way for some folks because ignorant masses of miners can easily be convinced to blindly trust some pool or other, not caring what the heck their hashes are really being used for just as long as they get paid.

-MarkM-

Now you've lost me.  Blocks get orphaned when other miners don't receive the current block in time to build on it.  It doesn't matter how many "nodes" have the block, if the other miners don't have it, then their blocks become orphaned.  Those miners who don't have the necessary bandwidth resources shut down due to lack of revenue and centralization occurs.

If miners can mine with cheaper electricity, then they can maintain a profit with less bitcoin received per hash calculated.  Those who can't afford the necessary bandwidth resources shut down due to lack of revenue and centralization occurs.

[johnyj]

. . . so that I can quietly and quickly mine the rest of the coins on the original chain . . .

This is impossible.  You need to spend some time learning how bitcoin works.  It will take approximately 140 years to mine all the bitcoin on the old chain.  That is true if you are the only miner, or if every person on the planet runs a 100 THz ASIC.

The last statement is strange 

Actually I'm quite satisfied with 50 coins per day, if I took 3600 coins per day, then I will be the whole network, I think many of people here will compete with me to avoid this from happening

[DannyHamilton]

. . . so that I can quietly and quickly mine the rest of the coins on the original chain . . .

- snip -
or if every person on the planet runs a 100 THz ASIC.

The last statement is strange  
- snip -

Strange?  Why?

Edit: I didn't try the math on that one.  Is there any chance that the product of the world population times 1 THash works out to be so high that the necessary target can't be represented with 256 bit number?  I doubt it, but now I'm wondering.  Perhaps I'll grab a napkin and see.

Edit 2: Nah, plenty of room in a 256 bit target to accommodate that much hashing power.

[markm]

2^256 is big, did you check if every star in the galaxy had a planet with the same population as Earth and all of those people had 100THh ASICs? As we already know one star's entire output of energy over its lifetime doesn't provide enough energy to even count up to 2^256, don't we?

Are enough galaxies visible to the Hubble that if they all...

-MarkM-

[MineForeman.com]

Whoever runs bitcoin.org runs bitcoin. Unfortunately bitcoin is not decentralized in this regard. At any moment, whoever runs that site can put up Bitcoin 0.9.0, call it an urgent release and dispose of the block limit. Chances are most of the network would upgrade to it with no questions ask. All the naysayers would be left in the dust and with a fork that wouldn't even be worth a nickel per coin.

I'm sorry. The war is lost. Unless one of you buys out bitcoin.org or defames it to the point that it drops off the front page of Google. There is too much lobbying pressure from Mt.Gox, SatoshiDice and others for the block limit to remain.

I take no sides on this issue.

Fortunately there is a good way to do this, clone the bitcoind repository, make the changes and ask people to use it.

If the majority of people agree with you the chain will fork in your favour.  It is a kind of bitcoin election.

[DannyHamilton]

2^256 is big,

Yes, I knew this, which is why I made the statement without checking the math.  But then I started to think...

"7 billion times 1 trillion times 600 is big"  I was pretty sure it wasn't nearly big enough to be a concern, but I decided to count the zeros and see if it even approached 2¹²⁸

Turns out it's only about as big as 2⁸².

[mobile4ever]

Whoever runs bitcoin.org runs bitcoin.

The work on bitcoin is being done over at github, not bitcoin.org:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.github.com

[DannyHamilton]

Whoever runs bitcoin.org runs bitcoin.

The work on bitcoin is being done over at github, not bitcoin.org:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.github.com

Sure, but I think the point that the OP was making is that he believes that the vast majority of users download pre-compiled executables from bitcoin.org.  Whoever posts those executables there will influence a significant portion of the network.

[johnyj]

. . . so that I can quietly and quickly mine the rest of the coins on the original chain . . .

- snip -
or if every person on the planet runs a 100 THz ASIC.

The last statement is strange  
- snip -

Strange?  Why?

Edit: I didn't try the math on that one.  Is there any chance that the product of the world population times 1 THash works out to be so high that the necessary target can't be represented with 256 bit number?  I doubt it, but now I'm wondering.  Perhaps I'll grab a napkin and see.

Edit 2: Nah, plenty of room in a 256 bit target to accommodate that much hashing power.

I mean, why other people's hasing power has anything to do with me if they are hashing on a different chain? The difficulty on the original chain will drop quickly and maybe gpu even cpu miners will be able to mine some coin

[The Fool]

Whoever runs bitcoin.org runs bitcoin.

The work on bitcoin is being done over at github, not bitcoin.org:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.github.com

Sure, but I think the point that the OP was making is that he believes that the vast majority of users download pre-compiled executables from bitcoin.org.  Whoever posts those executables there will influence a significant portion of the network.

Exactly.

[Monster Tent]

I dont think people in the US quite understand the issue the rest of us have where bandwidth is not unlimited.

[twolifeinexile]

Whoever runs bitcoin.org runs bitcoin.

The work on bitcoin is being done over at github, not bitcoin.org:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.github.com

Sure, but I think the point that the OP was making is that he believes that the vast majority of users download pre-compiled executables from bitcoin.org.  Whoever posts those executables there will influence a significant portion of the network.

But even this, according to Gavin, core developers may develop a "vote by computing power" approach and will not raise the limit if the block generated do not generate enough "Yay". So this concern may have merits, it is actually not as strong as OP indicates.

[tvbcof]

I dont think people in the US quite understand the issue the rest of us have where bandwidth is not unlimited.

Actually much of the US does not have particularly good bandwidth either.  I, for instance, pay $80 for 15G/month.

More ominously, almost all of us enjoy network bandwidth at the pleasure of our ISPs, and almost all ISPs operate at the pleasure of government regulatory bodies.  In the US, at least, the regulatory bodies operate at the pleasure of the lobbyists from corporations and other special interests.

Even 'normal consumer bandwidth' may need to be cut by a large factor to allow something like Bitcoin transactions to slip through the cracks if at some point it starts to threaten more mainstream (and profitable) solutions.