Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[justusranvier]

I'd say the term "store of value" has meaning in the context our current world of fiat money, where you need a hedge against inflation. In the case of Bitcoin while it is still not yet mainstream I think a special definition is useful: an asset that retains or grows its purchasing power over the years (particularly in contrast with fiat money), with growth of course being considered even better as a store of value than simply staying level. Also the difficulty in confiscating it should be part of its store-of-value merits.

There is certainly a difference between forms of money that work well, and forms of money that don't, that many people have observed throughout history.

The problem is that the explanations for those observations are not correct, because they are tautological. They show up in conversations with goldbugs all the time.

Q: What is a store of value?
A: Anything that has the properties of gold.

Q: Why is gold a store of value?
A: Because it has intrinsic value.

Q: What is value?
A: It's what anything with the properties of gold has.

Q: Can you give reason why I should buy your gold other than that you want to sell it?
A: ...no.

[1714042770]

1714042770

[Peter R]

[...]
So…is this a good idea?  If there are no obvious "gotchas" then perhaps we should write up a BIP.

I'd be willing to help! But I'd also suggest to just make it about the configurable setting and leave the rest to the user. I think signalling about blocksize has to happen out-of-band for the time being. Because it is potentially a lot of code complexity. And simple IMO beats complex here.

Just make it mandatory to start bitcoind with -maxblocksizelimit (or similar) and have an edit box for bitcoin-qt that has to be filled with a value. The amount of code change should be about the same as BIP101.

Start requesting this value at some switchover date in the future - maybe at the beginning of Gavin's increase schedule. Reason for this: Time for user education on building a function Bitcoin network.

What do you think?

I think that all makes perfect sense, and I agree that simple is better!  Perhaps the BIP could only advocate for doing what you said to start, and then there could be a follow-up BIP to do the signalling in the block headers and to add the p2p "block size limit request" messages.  The nice thing is that the signalling stuff in the follow-up BIP would have nothing to do with the consensus layer, so it would be much easier to build support for it.  

I'd be willing to contribute to this too.  Realistically, I couldn't do any serious work on this until mid-September, however.  Timing wise, it would be great to have a polished proposal published for the second Scalability Workshop in Hong Kong probably in November or December: https://scalingbitcoin.org/

I'm actually quite excited about this idea.  It has a sort of inevitable feel to it.

[Erdogan]

…
At this point I'd say just find a way to put the forks on the market and let's arbitrage it out. I will submit if a fork cannot gain the market cap advantage, and I suspect the small-blockers will likewise if Core loses it. Money talks.

I had a strange idea recently: what if we don't even bother with BIP100, BIP101, etc., or trying to come to "consensus" in some formal way.  What if, instead, we just make it very easy for node operators to adjust their block size limit.  Imagine a drop down menu where you can select "1 MB, 2 MB, 4 MB, 8 MB, … ."  What would happen?  

Personally, I'd just select some big block size limit, like 32 MB.  This way, I'd be guaranteed to follow the longest proof of work chain, regardless of what the effective block size limit becomes.  I'd expect many people to do the same thing.  Eventually, it becomes obvious that the economic majority is supporting a larger limit, and a brave miner publishes a block that is 1.1 MB is size.  We all witness that indeed that block got included into the longest proof of work chain, and then suddenly all miners are confident producing 1.1 MB blocks.  Thus, the effective block size limit slowly creeps upwards, as this process is repeated over and over as demand for block space grows.

TL/DR: maybe we don't need a strict definition for the max block size limit.

That is exactly what I think. The miners will have to try it out or get some feel of what they can do through other channels (social media, conferences, node versions), including associate with other miners. As long as the association is voluntary, it will not form a monopoly.

[Erdogan]

Note that this toe dipping is the reality also if we go to 2 MB. There could be some bug related to the network or whatever, that could slip through testing in all environments except the production blockchain. Heck, it is there now, unless we have had a block of excactly 1000000 bytes decimal. I guess some miners are not 100 percent certain that there is not an off-by-one bug there, so they just remove one transaction to be sure.

[iCEBREAKER]

i really see no technical reasons why we can't have bigger blocks.  now.

Then you're not looking hard enough.  Here, I'll help:

I'm not sure if you are aware of the centralization pressure that occurs when miners are allowed to pick their own block sizes. Miners have incentives to encourage a very high orphan rate, if the orphan rate is properly targeted. Mining is a 0-sum game, which means that miners have incentive to hurt eachother. (less competition means lower difficulty and more blocks for you).

The ideal scenario for a miner is that the block they produce immediately hits a large portion of the hash power (at least 51%, but I'm not sure what the optimal percentage is), and then never hits the remaining hashpower at all. That remaining hashpower will have to find 2 blocks before the rest of the hashpower finds a single block - this will be detrimental to the profits of the minority hashpower, significantly so.

Large blocks provide a way to achieve this to some effect for bigger miners....

...This attack can be levied by a single large miner with no collusion. Simply by prioritizing the other large miners, and refusing to send the block to the low-bandwidth minority, a big miner can create blocks large enough to heavily impact the orphan rate of smaller miners without significantly affecting their own orphan rate.

This is very bad. The block size limit is important to stop this class of attack.

The vast majority of research demonstrates that blocksize does matter, blocksize caps are required to secure the network, and large blocks are a centralizing pressure.

Here’s a short list of what has been published so far:

1) No blocksize cap and no minimum fee leads to catastrophic breakage as miners chase marginal 0 fees:

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2400519

It’s important to note that mandatory minimum fees could simply be rebated out-of-band, which would lead to the same problems.

2) a) Large mining pools make strategies other than honest mining more profitable:

    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcArXiv.pdf

2) b) In the presence of latency, some alternative selfish strategy exists that is more profitable at any mining pool size. The larger the latency, the greater the selfish mining benefit:

    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.06183v1.pdf

3) Mining simulations run by Pieter Wuille shows that well-connected peers making a majority of the hashing power have an advantage over less-connected ones, earning more profits per hash. Larger blocks even further favor these well-connected peers. This gets even worse as we shift from block subsidy to fee based reward :

    http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg08161.html

4) Other point(s):

If there is no blocksize cap, a miner should simply snipe the fees from the latest block and try to stale that block by mining their own replacement. You get all the fees plus any more from new transactions. Full blocks gives less reward for doing so, since you have to choose which transactions to include. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fpuld/a_transaction_fee_market_exists_without_a_block/ctqxkq6

"I think this is a good idea" doesn't count.

Stamping your feet and demanding things be done "now" isn't going to help XT.

"Not tonight dear"   

[tvbcof]

The problem is that the explanations for those observations are not correct, because they are tautological. They show up in conversations with goldbugs all the time.

Where do you live?  Strawman City?

Q: What is a store of value?
A: Anything that has the properties of gold.
...

Actually, Bitcoin is something I consider a 'store of value' for a close reason.  Neither Bitcoin nor gold have counter-party risk, and that is actually fairly unusual characteristic these days and one I value highly because I consider one of most acute risks associated with wealth preservation to be an economic crisis where one can kiss almost anything with counter-party (or theft) risk bye-bye.

What gold has over Bitcoin is that it does not require a free and high capacity internet to function.  The only 'bandwidth' that gold needs is a ticker signal and that could be accomplished even with fairly low latency without a functional internet at all.  Even then, this need is a nicety more than a necessity.

Under conditions of economic crisis I believe it almost certain that there will be a significant clamp-down on the free flow of information.  Unfortunately this is termed an 'internet kill switch' which is misleading.  I expect it to be implemented as a shift from simply monitoring internet traffic to actively blocking that of it which is potentially damaging to those seeking to maintain control and shape society.  IOW, we will still have access to our porn and mainstream movies from an authorized intellectual property owner through large corporate providers, but it will be to 'dangerous to society' for unauthorized people to communicate directly with one another or to allow subversive ideas and data to be disseminated.

Bitcoin used in certain sophisticated ways which force multiply the bandwidth still has 'store of value' potential to me which is why I am still a hodler.  The simple reason for this is that it can at least in theory function in a world which is much different than we see today but is very likely to exist at the time when it actually matters.

That, in a nutshell, is why I am so opposed to growing Bitcoin in simplistic ways which box us in to a reliance on assumptions about the global internet based on the common experiences of today and most people's expectations for tomorrow.  'Dumb growth' hacks off what many people consider to be a vestigial appendage but to me it represents a very big part of the 'store of value' proposition for Bitcoin and one that makes it somewhat competitive with gold.

[notme]

[...]
So…is this a good idea?  If there are no obvious "gotchas" then perhaps we should write up a BIP.

I'd be willing to help! But I'd also suggest to just make it about the configurable setting and leave the rest to the user. I think signalling about blocksize has to happen out-of-band for the time being. Because it is potentially a lot of code complexity. And simple IMO beats complex here.

Just make it mandatory to start bitcoind with -maxblocksizelimit (or similar) and have an edit box for bitcoin-qt that has to be filled with a value. The amount of code change should be about the same as BIP101.

Start requesting this value at some switchover date in the future - maybe at the beginning of Gavin's increase schedule. Reason for this: Time for user education on building a function Bitcoin network.

What do you think?

I think that all makes perfect sense, and I agree that simple is better!  Perhaps the BIP could only advocate for doing what you said to start, and then there could be a follow-up BIP to do the signalling in the block headers and to add the p2p "block size limit request" messages.  The nice thing is that the signalling stuff in the follow-up BIP would have nothing to do with the consensus layer, so it would be much easier to build support for it.  

I'd be willing to contribute to this too.  Realistically, I couldn't do any serious work on this until mid-September, however.  Timing wise, it would be great to have a polished proposal published for the second Scalability Workshop in Hong Kong probably in November or December: https://scalingbitcoin.org/

I'm actually quite excited about this idea.  It has a sort of inevitable feel to it.

What about lying? If enough miners claim to support larger blocks but actually don't, then part of the network will waste time producing blocks that won't be built on.  IMO, if we want to put the power directly in miners hands it would be better to raise the limit entirely.  However, to do so we would need to test the crap out of everything to be reasonably sure that there aren't bugs that are only uncovered by larger blocks like what happened when the soft limit was raised to 1MB.

[Chainsaw]

I'm actually quite excited about this idea.  It has a sort of inevitable feel to it.

Yes.
I've been watching for months. This feels more right than any proposals I've seen to date.

[Odalv]

[...]
So…is this a good idea?  If there are no obvious "gotchas" then perhaps we should write up a BIP.

I'd be willing to help! But I'd also suggest to just make it about the configurable setting and leave the rest to the user. I think signalling about blocksize has to happen out-of-band for the time being. Because it is potentially a lot of code complexity. And simple IMO beats complex here.

Just make it mandatory to start bitcoind with -maxblocksizelimit (or similar) and have an edit box for bitcoin-qt that has to be filled with a value. The amount of code change should be about the same as BIP101.

Start requesting this value at some switchover date in the future - maybe at the beginning of Gavin's increase schedule. Reason for this: Time for user education on building a function Bitcoin network.

What do you think?

I think that all makes perfect sense, and I agree that simple is better!  Perhaps the BIP could only advocate for doing what you said to start, and then there could be a follow-up BIP to do the signalling in the block headers and to add the p2p "block size limit request" messages.  The nice thing is that the signalling stuff in the follow-up BIP would have nothing to do with the consensus layer, so it would be much easier to build support for it.  

I'd be willing to contribute to this too.  Realistically, I couldn't do any serious work on this until mid-September, however.  Timing wise, it would be great to have a polished proposal published for the second Scalability Workshop in Hong Kong probably in November or December: https://scalingbitcoin.org/

I'm actually quite excited about this idea.  It has a sort of inevitable feel to it.

What about lying? If enough miners claims to support larger blocks but actually don't, then part of the network will waste time producing blocks that won't be built on.  IMO, if we want to put the power directly in miners hands it would be better to raise the limit entirely.  However, to do so we would need to test the crap out of everything to be reasonably sure that there aren't bugs that are only uncovered by larger blocks like what happened when the soft limit was raised to 1MB.

+1
 - I can't wait how this bloat chains supporters will hit the wall. If it was so easy "just increase numbers and we will have 10 times more faster network ... increase to the infinity" :-)

 - please start XT tomorrow. I like fun.

[thezerg]

…
At this point I'd say just find a way to put the forks on the market and let's arbitrage it out. I will submit if a fork cannot gain the market cap advantage, and I suspect the small-blockers will likewise if Core loses it. Money talks.

I had a strange idea recently: what if we don't even bother with BIP100, BIP101, etc., or trying to come to "consensus" in some formal way.  What if, instead, we just make it very easy for node operators to adjust their block size limit.  Imagine a drop down menu where you can select "1 MB, 2 MB, 4 MB, 8 MB, … ."  What would happen?  

Personally, I'd just select some big block size limit, like 32 MB.  This way, I'd be guaranteed to follow the longest proof of work chain, regardless of what the effective block size limit becomes.  I'd expect many people to do the same thing.  Eventually, it becomes obvious that the economic majority is supporting a larger limit, and a brave miner publishes a block that is 1.1 MB is size.  We all witness that indeed that block got included into the longest proof of work chain, and then suddenly all miners are confident producing 1.1 MB blocks.  Thus, the effective block size limit slowly creeps upwards, as this process is repeated over and over as demand for block space grows.

TL/DR: maybe we don't need a strict definition for the max block size limit.

That is exactly what I think. The miners will have to try it out or get some feel of what they can do through other channels (social media, conferences, node versions), including associate with other miners. As long as the association is voluntary, it will not form a monopoly.

yes, this has been considered and discussed before.  The danger is that a large block miner cartel might develop naturally whose blocks put small-bandwidth players at a disadvantage.  But as others have mentioned, some people are at an electricity cost disadvantage, some bandwidth, some something else... basically it would just be another metric to take into account as you site your miners.

So I would be 100% for this if miners could only work with real txns.  But a miner could fill up a huge block with a bunch of "fake" (unrelayed, fee pays to himself) txns to artificially drive up network costs.  Its too bad Bitcoin doesn't have the "pay portion of fees to miner pool, receive portion for the next N blocks" feature... that idea closes a lot of miner loopholes.  

But regardless I'm not sure if this "loophole" really is one; it does require 51% of the network to be as connected as you are and willing to process your monster garbage block.  I have a hard time believing that miners would do so since over the long term they need bitcoin to succeed.  More likely (as you guys suggest) they'll just configure their nodes to ignore monster blocks unless > N deep in the chain.

[Peter R]

What about lying? If enough miners claim to support larger blocks but actually don't, then part of the network will waste time producing blocks that won't be built on.  IMO, if we want to put the power directly in miners hands it would be better to raise the limit entirely.  However, to do so we would need to test the crap out of everything to be reasonably sure that there aren't bugs that are only uncovered by larger blocks like what happened when the soft limit was raised to 1MB.

I don't think it would be a problem.  Like Erdogan said, the miners will use the "tip-toe" method of increasing the block size.  Worst case, a large block gets orphaned and nobody tries again for a while.  But if the larger block doesn't get orphaned, then the network will assume that that size is now supported (thereby setting a new effective upper limit).

IMO, if we want to put the power directly in miners hands it would be better to raise the limit entirely.

This doesn't put the power directly in the miners' hands.  It keeps the power where it already is: in everybody's hands!  It just makes it much easier for people to exercise the power they already possess.  

However, to do so we would need to test the crap out of everything to be reasonably sure that there aren't bugs that are only uncovered by larger blocks like what happened when the soft limit was raised to 1MB.

I disagree.  For example, I would not set my node's limit to anything greater than 32 MB until I understood the 33.5 MB message size limitation better.  I expect many people would do the same thing.  Rational miners won't dare to randomly publish a 100 MB block, because they'd be worried that it would be orphaned.

Furthermore, since miners would likely use the "tip-toe" method, the effective block size limit will grow only in very small increments, helping to reveal any potential limitations before they become problems.

[Adrian-x]

what is the latest version of XT, is it still a test version?

[cypherdoc]

What about lying? If enough miners claim to support larger blocks but actually don't, then part of the network will waste time producing blocks that won't be built on.  IMO, if we want to put the power directly in miners hands it would be better to raise the limit entirely.  However, to do so we would need to test the crap out of everything to be reasonably sure that there aren't bugs that are only uncovered by larger blocks like what happened when the soft limit was raised to 1MB.

I don't think it would be a problem.  Like Erdogan said, the miners will use the "tip-toe" method of increasing the block size.  Worst case, a large block gets orphaned and nobody tries again for a while.  But if the larger block doesn't get orphaned, then the network will assume that that size is now supported (thereby setting a new effective upper limit).

IMO, if we want to put the power directly in miners hands it would be better to raise the limit entirely.

This doesn't put the power directly in the miners' hands.  It keeps the power where it already is: in everybody's hands!  It just makes it much easier for people to exercise the power they already possess.  

However, to do so we would need to test the crap out of everything to be reasonably sure that there aren't bugs that are only uncovered by larger blocks like what happened when the soft limit was raised to 1MB.

I disagree.  For example, I would not set my node's limit to anything greater than 32 MB until I understood the 33.5 MB message size limitation better.  I expect many people would do the same thing.  Rational miners won't dare to randomly publish a 100 MB block, because they'd be worried that it would be orphaned.

Furthermore, since miners would likely use the "tip-toe" method, the effective block size limit will grow only in very small increments, helping to reveal any potential limitations before they become problems.

yes, i've called this "advancing together" but "tip toeing" is even a better descriptor as it implies small baby steps upwards as opposed to random big steps.  miners will not only do what's best for themselves but what's best for the group.  they know that all hands on deck are needed as a team to replace the existing financial order.  where BitcoinXT is going there will be plenty of profits to be had for existing cooperative players as well as new entrants.  the stakes are enormous to the upside but individual miners cannot afford to be caught being dishonest or attacking or they will be left behind or severely deprecated ala ghash.  what a shame to miss out on being the next JPM as a result of being greedy.

[Adrian-x]

…
At this point I'd say just find a way to put the forks on the market and let's arbitrage it out. I will submit if a fork cannot gain the market cap advantage, and I suspect the small-blockers will likewise if Core loses it. Money talks.

I had a strange idea recently: what if we don't even bother with BIP100, BIP101, etc., or trying to come to "consensus" in some formal way.  What if, instead, we just make it very easy for node operators to adjust their block size limit.  Imagine a drop down menu where you can select "1 MB, 2 MB, 4 MB, 8 MB, … ."  What would happen?  

Personally, I'd just select some big block size limit, like 32 MB.  This way, I'd be guaranteed to follow the longest proof of work chain, regardless of what the effective block size limit becomes.  I'd expect many people to do the same thing.  Eventually, it becomes obvious that the economic majority is supporting a larger limit, and a brave miner publishes a block that is 1.1 MB is size.  We all witness that indeed that block got included into the longest proof of work chain, and then suddenly all miners are confident producing 1.1 MB blocks.  Thus, the effective block size limit slowly creeps upwards, as this process is repeated over and over as demand for block space grows.

TL/DR: maybe we don't need a strict definition for the max block size limit.

Nodes have the power to do that, even a right given they host the data, however they dont have the the market knowledge to know what it should be, the power to set the block size must come from the incentive schema designed as designed by Satosi to work.  I cant imagine it would work out well at all, probably better than limiting the block size but not my much.  

[solex]

The network would dynamically determine the max block size as the network evolves by expressing the size of the blocks they will accept with the drop-down menu on their client.

So…is this a good idea?  If there are no obvious "gotchas" then perhaps we should write up a BIP.

I like the principle of the idea, however the idea of voting by non-miners is subject to Sybil attack - someone spinning up many fake nodes to skew the results. There have been posts on the mailing list about various voting schemes.

Going one better than simple user voting is proof-of-stake voting:

Proof-of-stake voting could be combined with miner voting (like BIP-100) to get a balance between mining power and investors/holders.
https://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg02323.html
A drop down box, which would need supporting on the many wallet providers, then allows people to vote depending upon their coin balance. A non-vote is a "vote" for no change.

Except, the problem with proof-of-stake voting is summarized by Alan Reiner (Armory developer) in the responses to this proposal:

One major problem I see with this, no matter how well-thought-out it is,
it's unlikely that those with money will participate.  Those with the
most stake, likely have their private keys behind super-secure
accessibility barriers, and are not likely to go through the effort just
to sign votes.  Not only that, but it would require them to reveal their
public key, which while isn't technically so terrible, large amounts of
money intended to be kept in storage for 10+ years will prefer to avoid
any exposure at all, in the oft-chance that QCs come around a lot
earlier than we expected.  Sure, the actual risk should be pretty much
non-existent, but some of the most paranoid folks are probably the same
ones who have a lot of funds and want 100.00% of the security that is
possible.   They will see this as wildly inconvenient.

[Adrian-x]

yeah, but you're in Norway  

Japan

but back to this, you and i can't be outliers as much as LukeJr and gmax want everyone to think in terms of bandwidth speed.  we can easily handle a significant block size increase, no problem.

furthermore:

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-unveils-2-5-inch-16tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/

i really see no technical reasons why we can't have bigger blocks.  now.

Yeah I think we're past that point in the debate. It's now clear that the concern of those who make the technical claims regarding bandwidth is about ensuring that Bitcoin node-running is an all-inclusive activity. They insist that no one can be left out, or else it's not a "consensus." Well we're being left out right now, aren't we. By their logic we should be able to halt Bitcoin entirely during this debate because they don't have our consensus. There is no internal consistency in the whole "consensus" line of reasoning. It's just a feel-good buzzword except in the very narrow sense that of course the code will only run among those who are currently in consensus. The lack of any mention of market cap or other economic factor during such invocations of consensus should be a red flag.

There are aspects of the debate where intelligent people may disagree, but this part is pure reactionary stalwartism at this point. It doesn't even jive with the fundamental nature of open source software, which makes consensus a fluid concept. At this point I'd say just find a way to put the forks on the market and let's arbitrage it out. I will submit if a fork cannot gain the market cap advantage, and I suspect the small-blockers will likewise if Core loses it. Money talks.

i've flipped the question around to the Cripplecoiner's a few times, as in, what happens if Gavin is the sole dissenter when the need to slip in the spvp for SC's comes around in a year or so?  will they gracefully and quietly back off since they won't have consensus?  the angry answer i get back always sounds like they'll ram it thru anyways.

another reason Cripplecoiner's want to see 0 hard forks is they have invested or are investing in systems that could be obsoleted very easily with small tweaks to the code. I suspect if someone like Gavin who isent invested in there company can come in and make a change without there permission its very threatening to there future which may even depend on bugs in the code that cant be fixed for legacy reasons.

[HeliKopterBen]

[...]
So…is this a good idea?  If there are no obvious "gotchas" then perhaps we should write up a BIP.

I'd be willing to help! But I'd also suggest to just make it about the configurable setting and leave the rest to the user. I think signalling about blocksize has to happen out-of-band for the time being. Because it is potentially a lot of code complexity. And simple IMO beats complex here.

Just make it mandatory to start bitcoind with -maxblocksizelimit (or similar) and have an edit box for bitcoin-qt that has to be filled with a value. The amount of code change should be about the same as BIP101.

Start requesting this value at some switchover date in the future - maybe at the beginning of Gavin's increase schedule. Reason for this: Time for user education on building a function Bitcoin network.

What do you think?

I think that all makes perfect sense, and I agree that simple is better!  Perhaps the BIP could only advocate for doing what you said to start, and then there could be a follow-up BIP to do the signalling in the block headers and to add the p2p "block size limit request" messages.  The nice thing is that the signalling stuff in the follow-up BIP would have nothing to do with the consensus layer, so it would be much easier to build support for it.  

I'd be willing to contribute to this too.  Realistically, I couldn't do any serious work on this until mid-September, however.  Timing wise, it would be great to have a polished proposal published for the second Scalability Workshop in Hong Kong probably in November or December: https://scalingbitcoin.org/

I'm actually quite excited about this idea.  It has a sort of inevitable feel to it.

I think you guys are on to something here.  Could you have an option in the dropdown to choose a dynamic limit that is 1 standard deviation above a 30 day moving average (or use data points of the previous 4320 blocks, which is about 1 month, to calculate variance), or something similar?  That way the user could set his limit to stay within a reasonable upper range without restricting usage.

[cypherdoc]

what is the latest version of XT, is it still a test version?

0.11A is the testing version of the actual bigger block software, i think.

i'm running 0.10.2 which is the stable version but doesn't have the bigger blocks enabled.

both versions mine Core as usual, as you'd expect.

[Adrian-x]

Jeff is saying that miner voting via BIP100 will be submitted (merged in the BIP library?) implemented (pull request?) within two weeks.

This is great news. I see it as compatible with BIP 101 if a mined block size conforms to the least of the prevailing maximum of 100 and 101.

http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/BIP100-blocksizechangeproposal.pdf

Protocol changes proposed:
1. Hard fork, to
2. Remove static 1MB block size limit.
3. Simultaneously,​addanewfloatingblocksizelimit,setto1MB.
4. The historical 32MB limit remains.
5. Schedule the hard fork on testnet for September 1, 2015.
6. Schedule the hard fork on bitcoin main chain for January 11, 2016.
7. Changing the 1MB limit is accomplished in a manner similar to BIP 34, a one­way lock­in
upgrade with a 12,000 block (3 month) threshold by 90% of the blocks.
8. Limit increase or decrease may not exceed 2x in any one step.
9. Miners vote by encoding ‘BV’+BlockSizeRequestValue into coinbase scriptSig, e.g.
“/BV8000000/” to vote for 8M. Votes are evaluated by dropping bottom 20% and top 20%, and then the most common floor (minimum) is chosen.

edit: point 7 with 90% would IMHO be improved with 75% + 2 week grace period.

hey solex you seem to have a good take on BIP100, i started formulating my thoughts when NEY Liberty was pushing it over BIP 101
i would like your opinion on the idea that miners can maintain a cartel by voting?

From what I understand PIP100 gives the power to miners to set the block size (all be it with a vote?)

That's all good and well knowing miners should set there own block size, so on the service BIP100 seems fine.

Miners also dont pay the cost for large blocks, the nodes do, and as Peter_R has illustrated mathematically, Satoshi's original design optimizes block size based on market demand, while leaving nodes with ultimate control, (and removing the need for nodes or developers to manage block size)  

So the issue I see with BIP100 is if the majority of Miners collude to form a cartel to set the limit they can set it too low to suite the cartel's preferences, the difference between BIP 100 and BIP 101 to me, is that BIP100 miners cant leave the carrell and mine bigger blocks if there is a market for it, in the case with BIP100 the cartel needs to vote.

Whereas with BIP101 Miners can form a cartel but if it becomes more profitable to mine larger blocks they can break from the cartel without having to get a majority vote.

the innate incentive that limits the ability for cartels to form is important, BIP 100 is a change to an innate incentive in Bitcoin.  

Playing devils advocate here and creating a worse case scenario, imagine the optimal market equilibrium for block size and transaction cost resulted in the demand for a 16MB block, a majority of miners could form a voting cartel, and set a limit at 8MB, there would be no reason to do this in a free market because they would loose revenue, but in a controlled market for transaction fees where Sidechains exist, it becomes possible to manipulate the block size to undermine competition, a simple way to do it would be to limit your completion's revenue by limiting block size, if you were uncompetitive in block propagation that would give you an unfair advantage. In the case with SideChains the cartel could supplement revenue by being paid to Merge Mining side-chains that other miners dont have assess too.

giving the power to set block size to the miners by vote of the majority seems to me will ultimately tend towards centralization, where in BIP101 this power is vested in the market and incentives that govern it. More important, it's not a change to Satosis design which seems to have the incentive balance just right.  

[cypherdoc]

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At this point I'd say just find a way to put the forks on the market and let's arbitrage it out. I will submit if a fork cannot gain the market cap advantage, and I suspect the small-blockers will likewise if Core loses it. Money talks.

I had a strange idea recently: what if we don't even bother with BIP100, BIP101, etc., or trying to come to "consensus" in some formal way.  What if, instead, we just make it very easy for node operators to adjust their block size limit.  Imagine a drop down menu where you can select "1 MB, 2 MB, 4 MB, 8 MB, … ."  What would happen?  

Personally, I'd just select some big block size limit, like 32 MB.  This way, I'd be guaranteed to follow the longest proof of work chain, regardless of what the effective block size limit becomes.  I'd expect many people to do the same thing.  Eventually, it becomes obvious that the economic majority is supporting a larger limit, and a brave miner publishes a block that is 1.1 MB is size.  We all witness that indeed that block got included into the longest proof of work chain, and then suddenly all miners are confident producing 1.1 MB blocks.  Thus, the effective block size limit slowly creeps upwards, as this process is repeated over and over as demand for block space grows.

TL/DR: maybe we don't need a strict definition for the max block size limit.

Nodes have the power to do that, even a right given they host the data, however they dont have the the market knowledge to know what it should be, the power to set the block size must come from the incentive schema designed as designed by Satosi to work.  I cant imagine it would work out well at all, probably better than limiting the block size but not my much.  

that's not the pt. 

the full nodes should and will care only about what tx volume they have the capability or desire to validate.  for me, despite not getting paid, i will want to max out those validation capabilities to whatever i'm willing to pay (donate) to the network, which is much higher than it is being used today.  i want Bitcoin to grow in size and price so i'm going to donate to my hearts content trying to make that happen.   the Cripplecoiners will say that is no way to run a full node but i'll bet there are thousands of guys like me who are willing to do this for the prospect of taking the price to the next 10x level.  there is nothing wrong with wanting a higher price b/c a much higher price is essential to Bitcoin's overall success and ability to move large scale tx's as we've argued about before.  it has to be able to allow large tx's in the $millions to fund purchases of real estate, yachts, planes or bigger items so as not to perturb the overall exchange price, unlike what we have today. 

as more users come onboard, merchants will have the incentive, not to mention fiduciary responsibility to run full nodes.  that's a good thing.

but if someone designs a full node fee mkt, i won't be complaining either.