Ahh yup. We're talking about 2 completely different problems here. Things like the size of the whole block-chain, download times, propagation times for new blocks -- those technical challenges can all be readily solved/improved. But this thread alludes to an
Economic feature built-in to Bitcoin. Namely, if nobody touches the design, and Bitcoin usage keeps growing, miners
should (if they're smart enough
) learn to manage
Velocity and help dampen speculative bubbles and make the charts much less embarrassing.
It only dawned on me recently: one of the reasons the BTC exchange rate has always been so volatile is because there has been too much spare capacity in each block. This allowed small miners (less than 1% hashing power) to effectively break the market for transaction fees. Instead of working smartly to maximise profits, they just brutally accept as many transactions as possible, which cranks velocity up to 11, and leaves all the other miners stranded and unable to slow things down. Obviously the pools can
try to adjust transaction rates... but they would only be able to influence very fast spikes and dips. All the longer trends would be firmly in the hands of... you guessed it: anyone reckless enough to fill up a whole block with free transactions.
Now that Bitcoin has grown so much that the spare capacity in each block is no longer "dangerously" big and exploitable by rogue miners... some people are talking about drastically increasing the block size, and some are suggesting making it dynamic
but out of the hands of miners "because they can't be trusted".
You seem pretty sure that increasing the blocksize will kill Bitcoin - sure enough that you don't provide any poll option for it happening and not creating a catastrophe.
Any particular reason you feel that way?
Hmm, I guess I should have been more objective and less driven by emotion when creating the poll. Does the above answer your question? (Can you tell that I'm a panic-buyer/seller?
)
Poll
