Is it time to up the block size limit?

[Rothgar]

Shouldn't all the major pools raise their soft cap to 500kB or 1MB. 

Just a thought.  I think this would make room for the tremendous growth that we have seen this month. 

I wanna see what this puppy can do.   

[eleuthria]

Shouldn't all the major pools raise their soft cap to 500kB or 1MB.  

Just a thought.  I think this would make room for the tremendous growth that we have seen this month.  

I wanna see what this puppy can do.  

The only major pool that hasn't to my knowledge is ghash.io.  BTC Guild, Eligius, and BitMinter are already on 500K or higher max size blocks.


EDIT:  Slush is definitely still on 250K on at least some of his nodes, if not all.

[Rothgar]

What about Slush? 

[eleuthria]

What about Slush?  

Hmm...looks like slush is definitely still on the default 250K.

[os2sam]

Just can't have too many threads on this subject.  At least this one is a question as opposed to a demand.

[eleuthria]

Just can't have too many threads on this subject.  At least this one is a question as opposed to a demand.

To be fair, at least this one is also asking about a value under 1MB as well.  All the others are either asking for the full megabyte, or trying to urge us to hardfork to > 1MB.  It also made me realize that only ~50% of the network is doing blocks over 250KB apparently.  I thought more pools had at the very least moved to 400-600, if not the full meg.

[os2sam]

Just can't have too many threads on this subject.  At least this one is a question as opposed to a demand.

To be fair, at least this one is also asking about a value under 1MB as well.  All the others are either asking for the full megabyte, or trying to urge us to hardfork to > 1MB.  It also made me realize that only ~50% of the network is doing blocks over 250KB apparently.  I thought more pools had at the very least moved to 400-600, if not the full meg.

Supply and demand should be the regulating factor in block size.

If everyone increases their block size to the max then the supply of block space is devalued.

Demand should be gauged by the amount of transactions fee's people are willing to pay to get their transaction processed and not by demanding that pools increase the size of their blocks so that they can have a free ride.

Still the last 7 blocks only had two over the 250k default and most of the remainder where way under 250k.  So it seems to me that there is plenty of block space available for transactions right now.

[eleuthria]

On average, there is still way more than enough space in blocks even at 250KB.  The problems arise during the feeding frenzies on exchanges, or when the network has bad luck (30-60 minutes with no blocks).  That's when occasionally we get a backlog even on paying transactions.  BTC Guild *tries* to help with this by using a 150KB *minimum* size.  This at least helps clear out transactions that other pools won't because their minimum size is under 50 KB, so when we do need bigger blocks to hit the network there isn't quite as much backlog.

[os2sam]

And when the fee paying transactions become more common place block finding entities will increase their ability to process those transactions to capture more fees.

How difficult would it be for a pool to dynamically/on the fly adjust their block size according to how many transactions are available to process?  That seems like it would have a great value to all concerned.