AlexGR, do you allow for the possibility that maybe small blocks isn't a good idea?
Timing is crucial.
Even 1TB per year blocks (20mb/block) will have its time when 20mb/block will be "alright".
Upgrade too soon, you'll have 10gb txs and 990gb spam.
Upgrade on time, you'll get 800-950gb txs and 50-200gb spam.
I don't understand why it's spam when it pays a fee. Miners are free to exclude tx if the fee is too small.
Do you get spam in your ordinary physical mailbox? Do you think this spam is free? Isn't someone paying for the design, the paper, the kids who deliver it, etc etc?
Does this alter what it really is? It's still spam. Who cares if its paid or not.
As for miners, they will tend to follow the network guidelines, usually set by devs suggestions on default values. (However devs can't suggest higher fees due to the political climate)
I sort of like his moral approach to txs. Maybe we could introduce KYC on protocol level and purge the system for drug and CP payments as well. The latter seems even worse than spam txs.
There is no moral approach. It's just common sense to protect the system from abuse. Who told you that the system can't be attacked or abused? Certainly not Satoshi.
My reasoning goes like this: What would Satoshi do if he had to deal with a situation like this?
a) Give spammers as much space as they want - ever increasing capacity to meed their ever-increasing demands for cheap space to bloat, at near-zero costs for them, and significant costs for the network, increased centralization and problems to btc's adoption
b) Do something about it (blocksize limits / fees directly / fees as a consequence of a fee market, etc)
Well, the only thing that makes sense is B.
That's why not only bitcoin devs are going with (b) but ALSO altcoin devs that faced some kind of attack of this nature and patched their systems to protect them.
But the armchair experts all "know better", pretending spam isn't spam, and that spam growth equals growth.
Newsflash: The actual btc growth, that needs to be overlapped at the metcalfe chart with the marketcap, is not spam but legit txs - whether one has a good system to evaluate that, or by using statistics like excluding long chains (of spam).
If we can pump the marketcap by saying "see? wow, we have such a network effect" by simply spamming 10mb blocks and actually harming bitcoin in the process => then the market is broken because it is run by total idiots and bitcoin's price mechanism would be even more broken if its price was in direct relation to the spamming (rather than actual use).
Likewise, if someone says that ...1mb prevents growth because txs are hitting the limit, he's got his fundamentals waaaay wrong.
Legit growth is ongoing, despite the 1mb limit - and still way below 250-300k txs per day:
Excluding chains >100:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-chains-longer-than-100?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=Excluding chains >10:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-chains-longer-than-10?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=
Poll
