My thoughts about the blocksize thing

[SimonL]

i'll hop on the bandwagon too...more transactions per block means more fees for the miners

While you're hopping on the bandwagon you might to...actually read the posts in the Development & Technical Discussion forum regarding block size instead of merely regurgitating your view that "hard coded limits are bad." More transactions per block means less fees for miners. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out why.

If this is true, and miners have the option currently of including fewer (or 0) transactions in their blocks, why do current blocks not have minimal numbers of transactions?

It seems to me that to maximize transaction revenue, a miner would want to include the max number of paying transactions that he could, and a higher number per block would equal higher fees.

A free market regulating what is, and isn't an acceptable transaction fee seems totally appropriate, rather than pandering to miners to beg inclusion into the chain. I'm still fuzzy on why miners should be not only be beholden to blocksize limits but also be forced into a position to refuse transactions, even though the network and nodes may be fully capable of accommodating such transactions. It is blatantly arbitrary and never does the max blocksize limit ever take into consideration, nor even measure what the network is capable of handling.

[jgarzik]

I read your post sufficiently to note that you do not understand the concept of a hard fork, if you think we've already had one.

Even the combined output overflow bug fix, which lead to the longest chain fork in bitcoin history, cannot be considered a hard fork.  Vulnerable clients were able to remain on the network, after the bug was "healed."  This would not be the case in a hard fork.

[Akka]

I read your post sufficiently to note that you do not understand the concept of a hard fork, if you think we've already had one.

Even the combined output overflow bug fix, which lead to the longest chain fork in bitcoin history, cannot be considered a hard fork.  Vulnerable clients were able to remain on the network, after the bug was "healed."  This would not be the case in a hard fork.

The only difference to an actual hard fork and the example I gave was that the client in my example was not called Bitcoin-QT.

Nodes using this client where able using the Bitcoin Blockchain until the point where the first 25 BTC Reward was found. That's the point where they where not able to accept Bicoin Blockchain Blocks anymore and a spilt occured.

Also I only wanted to show that that doesn't mean a 100% infaltion. For this the example was sufficient:

That's not the first hardfork. Not even in recent times. Remember the reward halving. There was made a fork by some where the reward didn't halve.

So this was a 100% inflation immediately, too? OMG!

I'm sure you misunderstood me here. / Read more in my post than what I was trying to say.

But I thought that the combined output overflow Fix was one. I wasn't around at this time and from post referring to this issue I gained the Impression that old version would indeed not accept Blocks after this fix. So I was wrong there.

[twolifeinexile]

Why hard fork in your opinion is a inflation, hard fork essentailly make two versions of bitcoin, and in the end, only one could win or both lose.

Same money, now you can spend them twice in two different network, isn't that inflation?

After the fork, it is very difficult to explain to people why they need to know which version of bitcoin they are using, and since old coin can be used on both network, they will worth more than the new coin... and business owner have to give two price for their product: one for old coin and one for new coin... All of these will create confusion and the normal business owner will regard this as a result of failed experiment by computer geeks, and they just drop it

At least the adoption rate will drop for several years until people forget about this fork

More than half of bitcoins have been mined, so if I were the business, simple, only accept old coin, same amount in both chain, using the highest exchange rate of the two, the guy having old coin is not paying me twice, since ultimately only fork become longer than the other and miners would jump to and hash for it so it gains more hashing power and dominate again later.

How do you identify which coin is old and which coin is new?

BTW, there will be two chain, the length will be the same

The 'length' of the entire block chain refers to the chain with the most combined difficulty, not the one with the most blocks.

[Littleshop]

More than half of bitcoins have been mined, so if I were the business, simple, only accept old coin, same amount in both chain, using the highest exchange rate of the two, the guy having old coin is not paying me twice, since ultimately only fork become longer than the other and miners would jump to and hash for it so it gains more hashing power and dominate again later.

How do you identify which coin is old and which coin is new?

BTW, there will be two chain, the length will be the same

The 'length' of the entire block chain refers to the chain with the most combined difficulty, not the one with the most blocks.

Isn't amazing what Satoshi thought of in advance?

[tvbcof]

The 'length' of the entire block chain refers to the chain with the most combined difficulty, not the one with the most blocks.

Isn't amazing what Satoshi thought of in advance?

Yes.  It blows me away.

[twolifeinexile]

More than half of bitcoins have been mined, so if I were the business, simple, only accept old coin, same amount in both chain, using the highest exchange rate of the two, the guy having old coin is not paying me twice, since ultimately only fork become longer than the other and miners would jump to and hash for it so it gains more hashing power and dominate again later.

How do you identify which coin is old and which coin is new?

BTW, there will be two chain, the length will be the same

The 'length' of the entire block chain refers to the chain with the most combined difficulty, not the one with the most blocks.

Isn't amazing what Satoshi thought of in advance?

One of the key innovation of Satoshi, core security/trust model of bitcoin

[markm]

i'll hop on the bandwagon too...more transactions per block means more fees for the miners

While you're hopping on the bandwagon you might to...actually read the posts in the Development & Technical Discussion forum regarding block size instead of merely regurgitating your view that "hard coded limits are bad." More transactions per block means less fees for miners. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out why.

If this is true, and miners have the option currently of including fewer (or 0) transactions in their blocks, why do current blocks not have minimal numbers of transactions?

It seems to me that to maximize transaction revenue, a miner would want to include the max number of paying transactions that he could, and a higher number per block would equal higher fees.

A free market regulating what is, and isn't an acceptable transaction fee seems totally appropriate, rather than pandering to miners to beg inclusion into the chain. I'm still fuzzy on why miners should be not only be beholden to blocksize limits but also be forced into a position to refuse transactions, even though the network and nodes may be fully capable of accommodating such transactions. It is blatantly arbitrary and never does the max blocksize limit ever take into consideration, nor even measure what the network is capable of handling.

Sheesh, stop moaning then and simply send so many paying transactions day in and day out that you saturate the current block size limit.

Miners will be making so much money they will all eagerly upgrade their equipment and start lobbying for maybe even a far far larger max block size than you even imagine, simply because you provided enough fees to cover the upgrade and they are eager to attract more users like you - users who have a steady day in day out need for X megabytes per block, every block, just for their own transactions.

Isn't the whole point of the free market supposed to be the more money you bring to market the more merchants are going to clamour to come get some of that money? Bring the money.

Also it is not blatantly arbitrary it is what the network could handle, given the hardware and bandwith already paid for and installed. If you want more hardware and bandwidth paid for and installed, pay for it and either install it or let others take care of installing if you only want to pay the bill not do the actual work and deal with the nitty gritty details first-hand.

-MarkM-

[mp420]

And, if price dropped, the people's interest (and thus transaction volume) will decrease, then the system will become good again

...and doomed to stagnation. No more innovation would occur, no more moderately sized and up businesses would start accepting bitcoins, and the businesses that do accept it would phase it out over time. Interest in bitcoin would drop, and it would be declared a failure. Because of that stigma, businesses would become even more hesitant about accepting crypocurrency in general than they already are, and it would stay that way until either something radically different from bitcoin was created or several generations passed. Later on, people would look back in awe about how Bitcoin was far ahead of its time and wonder what happened. That is our worst-case scenario, and it's more likely than you might think.

This is exactly what I expect to happen. Not necessarily because of the block size limit thing, but because of some other technical, protocol-level oversight that is politically impossible to correct.

The only reason why I have any bitcoins is that I want to hedge against the possibility that I am wrong about this.

[markm]

You want to arbitrarily make a not-yet-needed change that could break the network just so you will feel confident that it is politically easy to make not-needed changes???

-MarkM-

[mp420]

You want to arbitrarily make a not-yet-needed change that could break the network just so you will feel confident that it is politically easy to make not-needed changes???

-MarkM-

The change is a necessary one IF Bitcoin becomes even a couple of orders of magnitude more widely adopted. Which would still mean it'd be a niche currency.

But I want it decided ASAP because I think hard forks such as this need to be done with a huge lead time. I support misterbigg's miner-voting proposal, or some variation of it. I do not support just raising the max block size to 10M (and creating another necessary hard fork in the hypothetical far future).

I do not think this is any kind of pressing issue at the moment, but hard forks can't be done just like that. Even if the actual fork happens ten years from now it would be very good to have the new protocol ready now.

[markm]

Well I think "we" are "doing is ASAP" in the sense that until "we" have figured out exactly what hard-forking changes will be bundled together into the next hard-fork no hard-fork should be attempted.

Who the "we" is might be part of what is being discussed, of course.

-MarkM-