Accordingly, I still have troubles understanding when the blocksize and/or scaling issues are presented as "an emergency."
Do you understand the principle of non-parallel lines in a two-dimensional cartesian coordinate system?
No. I don't understand: "non-parallel lines in a two-dimensional cartesian coordinate system."
Do I need to understand "non-parallel lines in a two-dimensional cartesian coordinate system" ...
In order to have an informed position of the severity of the problem, yes.
But first, let me step back. I may have befuddled you with jargon, and jargon may differ from time to time and from place to place. But the concept is pretty simple, and I imagine you grasp it intuitively, if not intellectually by the jargon I employed.
In a two-dimensional plane, two lines that are not parallel will eventually intersect. This is a geometric mathematical law. Let us illustrate the concept with an example:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions
What we are looking at is a chart of the number of Bitcoin blockchain transactions per day, plotted against the time axis of the last year. While it is very noisy, we can see that the trend over this year interval is that the number of transactions is clearly rising.
If we wanted to, we could engage in a process called 'curve fitting', where we kind of average out the high-frequency highs and lows, to show more of the trend, and less of the day-to-day variation. Even a moving 7-day average filters out a lot of spikiness:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?showDataPoints=false×pan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address=
As we filter out the day-to-day noise, we get a curve that we can use to extrapolate into the future, to make educated assumptions about what is likely to happen to that quantity as time passes.
Let us now perform a curve fitting to a straight line - while this may not have great fidelity to the past, in the absence of additional info, it is about the best we can hope for as a prediction tool. Eyeballing the graph, we see that we have gone from 'about 90,000' transactions a day one year ago to 'about 180,000' transactions today now. Or roughly doubled in a year.
So let us mark a point today at 180,000, and another point one year ago at 90,000, and draw a straight line through these points.
So there is one of our non-parallel lines. For the other, we need a representation of the max transactions per day that can be processed, based upon the max block size. Today, that number is 'about 350,000'. A year ago, and in all the intervening time, that number is 'about 350,000'. Before that, dating back to the time the 1MB limit was put in place as a temporary DoS avoidance scheme (back when bitcoins were cheap as pennies, BTW), that number was 'about 350,000'.
To represent this on our graph, let us draw a mental line straight across from left to right at the level above the current graph, where 350,000 would be if we preserved the Y axis scale. This is our other non-parallel line.
So with the max block size fixed at 1MB, yielding a hard limit of 'about 350,000' transactions a day, we can project the slope of our actual transactions per day line into the future. We find that they intersect at a point somewhat less than a year away.
At this point, I believe that the "emergency" is much exaggerated, and not as bit of a deal as it is being made out to be. That does not mean that NO action need be taken now, but it likely means that we do not need to rush into a solution that is imposed without considering various alternatives.
Look - I get that you're relatively new here. But rest assured we have been discussing this very issue for several years. Without that perspective in the rear view mirror, you may feel that the urgency is exaggerated. But to those of us who have been tracking this incipient problem for years, the situation does indeed appear dire.
The issue is that, once the lines intersect, growth is limited at the 'about 350,000' transactions a day level. The upward trending line of transactions a day flatlines - limited at the intersect to the system capacity.
She can' take any more, cap'n'You may claim that nearly a year is enough time to work things out. And that is the ~50% probability (assuming the 2x per year is a good curve fit). But those who have been around this for a while know that this animal seems to get adopted in fits and starts. If we had a proportional spike like we did in Jul, or in Sep, or in Dec, the system could not handle the volume. Period. No capacity whatsoever. If it was a spike, the backlog would eventually clear out. But how would the newcomers feel about their money being in limbo for a month? And what if it would have been Bitcoin's eternal September - we would kill all prospects of an explosion in adoption like the Internet experienced in 1993.
note: this is a napkin analysis. Quibbling on the actual numbers does not affect the outcome of 'we are indeed running out of time'.
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