Tell me, what will change tomorrow if you are already at the limit?
The only thing that can change is the proportion of dust/spam/bloat txs to actual transactions.
But most bigblockers don't even want to admit the situation right now and why we have the paradox of "tremendous demand", "full blocks" and ...near zero fees. They don't want to admit it's all spam that should have been cut off in the first place.
Uh? You will continue pricing out more and more transactions as they all compete for a static 2.7tps. Bleeding use cases and utility.
Technically speaking, the block size can go up any time the devs like and the miners / exchanges can sync - but users should definitely be warned a few months ahead.
If it was up to me, I would read the spirit of what satoshi meant by "need" in terms of future increases.
I don't get the sense that satoshi meant the "needs" of the spammers to bloat the blockchain. I don't get the sense from any of his late writings (when he had seen the network getting abused) that he wanted near-free txs, max block use for peanuts, leaving every spammer getting away with spamming for nothing etc. I don't get the sense that if he was running the show today that he would see a "need" to give spammers more space.
If satoshi proposed a BIP, I feel it would probably be along the lines of increasing recommended minimum fees to reduce spam and/or simultaneously increase the block size a little - having ensured though that the extra space isn't used for attacking the network and its functionality.
Miners determine what is spam and bloat. Satoshi gave his vision of a scaled network. You might have missed it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 It can jump wherever it wants if a spammer wants to spam you for peanuts and you aren't penalizing him for that, or if some miners are willing to process all the crap there is for peanuts.
Miners decide to penalize spam. Not the politburo. They have the incentives and the right to determine the size and fees contained in blocks they mine. Orphan(stale) risk is very real, and they won't risk 25 or 12.5 btc to include free bloat.
No, you want the devs to do that for you.
If we see it technically, you are seeking for a fee bypass mechanism which is a free-market intervention.
Nope. The mechanism is still the miners.
There are two ways to examine the network right now. One is "as is" and the other "as it should". In as-is configuration, we are seeing queues when there shouldn't be queues because the avg block is at 0.62mb instead of 1mb.
The as-it-should, would be an avg block of 0.99mb.
No, blocks shortly after the previous block will be coinbase only, distorting your metric, we will
never see avg. 0.99MB with a 1MB limit.
With the as-is method, there is an extra 50%+ capacity that isn't being used because some miners aren't even interested to raise the 750kb soft limiter or are mining 0-sized blocks. Economically speaking you could say that the fees are not incentivizing them to mine the txs. So instead of the market raising fees to incentivize them to mine, we open the relief-valve-bypass where we say "fuck the miners not mining txs to the limit of 1mb" and we create artificial ...supply of space.
Nope, they can/will still set their own limits. Just without a centrally decided upper bound of 1MB.
Next thing you know, we are at 2-4-8, because propagation sucks and increases orphan risk, a lot of miners don't even care to mine anything and we have a situation where 10-20% of the miners mine full blocks, the others don't even care. What then? Will you still say "ohhh blocks are full we need 20mb"? Will you ask devs to force miners to mine txs?
Nope, if a hypothetical eloipool decides to mine 50KB blocks, that is their right. Central planning is to be avoided, and individual pool decisions are not centrally decided.
If I am an outside actor (like government, banks etc) I can always find a social engineering vector to create friction:
If the miners are mining crap, I will blame them for mining crap and promote some new fork that "fixes" the problem.
If the miners aren't mining much, I will blame them for not mining much and promote some new fork that "fixes" the problem.
You can try to convince miners to act (or not act
!) against their own self interest, my guess is that they will refuse.
We've seen this already with the block size crap and I have the feeling we'll see it again. The solution will always be the same: United we stand, divided we fall.
I hope to be sending transactions in the same blocks you are, regardless of an anti DoS limit set in 2010.