Permanently keeping the 1MB (anti-spam) restriction is a great idea ...

[Cryddit]

For what it's worth: 

I'm the guy who went over the blockchain stuff in Satoshi's first cut of the bitcoin code.  Satoshi didn't have a 1MB limit in it. The limit was originally Hal Finney's idea.  Both Satoshi and I objected that it wouldn't scale at 1MB.  Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed.  The 1MB limit was there by the time Bitcoin launched.  But all 3 of us agreed that 1MB had to be temporary because it would never scale.

Several attempted "abuses" of the blockchain under the 1MB limit have proved Hal right about needing the limit at least for launching purposes.  A lot of people wanted to piggyback extraneous information onto the blockchain, and before miners (and the community generally) realized that blockchain space was a valuable resource they would have allowed it.  The blockchain would probably be several times as big a download now if that limit hadn't been in place, because it would have a lot of random 1-satoshi transactions that exist only to encode information for altcoins etc.

At this point I don't think random schmoes who would allow just any transaction are getting a  lot of blocks. The people who have made a major investment in hashing power are doing the math to figure out which tx are worthwhile to include because block propagation time (and therefore the risk of orphan blocks) is proportional to block size. So at this point I think blockchain bloat as such is no longer likely to a problem, and the 1MB limit is no longer necessary.  It has been more-or-less replaced by a profitability limit that motivates people to not waste blockchain bandwidth, and miners are now reliably dropping transactions that don't pay fees. 

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[oblivi]

...

20 mb is nice for a start, it will last as a year or two, three maybe, but it will need to be upgraded eventually as well. We are dangerously close to our limit with 1 my and we can't stay at 1 mb.

Gavins proposal automatically scales 40% per year after the 20mb raise, then stops after 20 years - last time I read up on it.

After 20 years this puts us at ~16.000 mb or 32.000 TX/second. That's more than the VISA network and I think it will last a long time.

I also support Gavin and OP.

Gavin is right, we should do this now before its too late.
Heres a video for noobs that explains it quickly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1KNbgoF-ZY

[R2D221]

Satoshi didn't have a 1MB limit in it.

Are you saying that the original plan was to have no limit at all? What would happen if we were just to remove the limit now, instead of making it bigger?

[Cryddit]

Satoshi didn't have a 1MB limit in it.

Are you saying that the original plan was to have no limit at all? What would happen if we were just to remove the limit now, instead of making it bigger?

The limit wasn't part of Satoshi's original plan, but keep in mind that the original plan was at that time very much a work in progress.  I was only involved for about a month back then.  When Hal and Satoshi started talking about involving more people, I dropped it.

[neuronics]

Thank you for this interesting resumé D&T, always enjoy to read your posts, they were very helpful since the early days to understand the inner workings of the technology better. I am convinced   

[xDan]

How do we decide what level of security is "required" for the network? What amount of hashing, what $$ spent on mining hardware... Is there a knowable, correct, answer?

Available hashing power must provide more reward when used to gain transaction fees than attacking.... right?

How do we know that existing coin minting even does this? (apart from it vaguely seeming like a very large amount, and no attacks really having happened)

[topminingcontracts]

Well another grate post of D&T

I am not a big fan of increasing the Blocksize to 20MB

Having said that.

We see a huge concentration in mining environment 4-5 hands control 75%+ of mining power (Pools and Large Ops)

If the Blocksize increase exponentially the numbers or nodes may drop in a significant way just because they require to much disk, actually the network increase but there are not so many full nodes (nodes sharing the blocks)

With centralized mining and few nodes Bitcoin will be weaker.

I understand the reasons of Gavin A. to increase the Blocksize but we need to find a solution for the problem and an analysis that includes all the players in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Lately I read many times that "The value is in the Blockchain" is true but without truly decentralized mining and a huge nodes constellation in line with the P2P Crypto Decentralized there is no Blockchain or Bitcoin (as currency)

Core Developers are a crucial part of all this, but also miners invest lot of money (more than all the VCs combined) and nodes add really decentralization to the system, we need an improvement that will generate more miners (not pools) more nodes and a healthy Bitcoin Network.

Regards

Juan

[amincd]

We see a huge concentration in mining environment 4-5 hands control 75%+ of mining power (Pools and Large Ops)

If the Blocksize increase exponentially the numbers or nodes may drop in a significant way just because they require to much disk, actually the network increase but there are not so many full nodes (nodes sharing the blocks)

The dominance of large mining pools is not due to the cost of running a node. There are thousands of full nodes, and yet the top 4-5 pools direct the majority of the network hashrate, as you note. The reason large pools have high hashrates is that pool size reduces the payout variance to miners, so miners prefer to use large pools.

So you need to be clear what you're trying to solve, and what is the cause of the problem. Because keeping the block size at 1 MB forever is not going to reduce the dominance of mining pools.

[RoadStress]

If the Blocksize increase exponentially the numbers or nodes may drop in a significant way just because they require to much disk, actually the network increase but there are not so many full nodes (nodes sharing the blocks)

Have you read all post from this thread? The "much disk" will not be needed! We have blockchain pruning.

[chaoman]

The issue is not whether or not a larger block is technically advantageous, it clearly is.

The issue is that many people will not update or go with the new fork, thus creating mass chaos.

[wilth1]

Satoshi didn't have a 1MB limit in it. The limit was originally Hal Finney's idea.  Both Satoshi and I objected that it wouldn't scale at 1MB.  Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed.  The 1MB limit was there by the time Bitcoin launched.

It would be great if Satoshi would chime in.  Maybe if the coin does indeed begin to snap in two?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Satoshi didn't have a 1MB limit in it. The limit was originally Hal Finney's idea.  Both Satoshi and I objected that it wouldn't scale at 1MB.  Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed.  The 1MB limit was there by the time Bitcoin launched.

It would be great if Satoshi would chime in.  Maybe if the coin does indeed begin to snap in two?

There is no need for Satoshi to chime in (although if he did reappear I have a list of questions).   The first version of the client had no block size limit.   The second version of the client had no block size limit.  The next 146 commits to the repo had no block size limit.  The source code is the proof.   The block size limit wasn't added as an anti-spam mechanism until more than 21 months after the genesis block.

[topminingcontracts]

We see a huge concentration in mining environment 4-5 hands control 75%+ of mining power (Pools and Large Ops)

If the Blocksize increase exponentially the numbers or nodes may drop in a significant way just because they require to much disk, actually the network increase but there are not so many full nodes (nodes sharing the blocks)

The dominance of large mining pools is not due to the cost of running a node. There are thousands of full nodes, and yet the top 4-5 pools direct the majority of the network hashrate, as you note. The reason large pools have high hashrates is that pool size reduces the payout variance to miners, so miners prefer to use large pools.

So you need to be clear what you're trying to solve, and what is the cause of the problem. Because keeping the block size at 1 MB forever is not going to reduce the dominance of mining pools.

I am just saying there are some issues to be solved more relevant than the size of the block.

Juang

[amincd]

They can be solved simultaneously. In the mean time, Bitcoin needs to seize the opportunity it has to attain mass adoption, which I believe cannot happen with a limit of 1,800 txs per block, due to the basic constraint it places on access per user.

[topminingcontracts]

If the Blocksize increase exponentially the numbers or nodes may drop in a significant way just because they require to much disk, actually the network increase but there are not so many full nodes (nodes sharing the blocks)

Have you read all post from this thread? The "much disk" will not be needed! We have blockchain pruning.

Well if the size of the block rise the size of blockchain database may rise or the upgrade is useless, bigger size more disk space and in my opinion full nodes are not so many.

Regards

Juan

[RoadStress]

If the Blocksize increase exponentially the numbers or nodes may drop in a significant way just because they require to much disk, actually the network increase but there are not so many full nodes (nodes sharing the blocks)

Have you read all post from this thread? The "much disk" will not be needed! We have blockchain pruning.

Well if the size of the block rise the size of blockchain database may rise or the upgrade is useless, bigger size more disk space and in my opinion full nodes are not so many.

Regards

Juan

Ok you are unable to read what people post here. Let me spell it for you:

B-L-O-C-K-C-H-A-I-N  P-R-U-N-I-N-G + cheapening of $/TB

Maybe now you get it!

[solex]

Satoshi didn't have a 1MB limit in it. The limit was originally Hal Finney's idea.  Both Satoshi and I objected that it wouldn't scale at 1MB.  Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed.  The 1MB limit was there by the time Bitcoin launched.

It would be great if Satoshi would chime in.  Maybe if the coin does indeed begin to snap in two?

There is no need for Satoshi to chime in (although if he did reappear I have a list of questions).   The first version of the client had no block size limit.   The second version of the client had no block size limit.  The next 146 commits to the repo had no block size limit.  The source code is the proof.   The block size limit wasn't added as an anti-spam mechanism until more than 21 months after the genesis block.

I think Satoshi was worried about rapid improvements in hashing power giving one rogue miner the ability to bloat the blockchain with a series of large (32MB?) blocks. The first mention of using FPGAs that I can find on Bitcointalk is July 2010, three months before the 1MB change. At the time Bitcoin was gaining traction with a community behind it, and a serious spam attack would have damaged its progress.

Thanks for the hashing analysis from a much more experienced perspective! I am still interested in how this little processor can do... even if I was off by a factor of about 10, it might still be competitive with much more expensive and energy intensive desktop processors. I can get about 2100 khash/sec using all 4 cores of my 64 bit machine when the system is otherwise idle, and that certainly makes the fans blow a lot of hot air. I though it might be possible for VIA to overcome because custom circuits (FPGA or ASIC) for some cryptographic functions have in the past proved orders of magnitude faster than general desktop processors or even GPUs.

(my bold emphasis)

[topminingcontracts]

If the Blocksize increase exponentially the numbers or nodes may drop in a significant way just because they require to much disk, actually the network increase but there are not so many full nodes (nodes sharing the blocks)

Have you read all post from this thread? The "much disk" will not be needed! We have blockchain pruning.

Well if the size of the block rise the size of blockchain database may rise or the upgrade is useless, bigger size more disk space and in my opinion full nodes are not so many.

Regards

Juan

Ok you are unable to read what people post here. Let me spell it for you:

B-L-O-C-K-C-H-A-I-N  P-R-U-N-I-N-G + cheapening of $/TB

Maybe now you get it!

I read and...?

Did I have to agree with the solution?

The main issue for me is we need to promote and secure the decentralization, and now Bitcoin is more centralized than the banking system. A single guy not a company or a group single people controls 1%+ of the system and most of the system is in a very small club of people this is not decentralized at all and that makes us a weak system simple to attack.

Juan

[R2D221]

The main issue for me is we need to promote and secure the decentralization, and now Bitcoin is more centralized than the banking system. A single guy not a company or a group single people controls 1%+ of the system and most of the system is in a very small club of people this is not decentralized at all and that makes us a weak system simple to attack.

Juan

So, Bitcoin is more centralized than the banking system? So, that means I can no longer make a BTC1000 transaction without explaining myself why and how I would do such a thing?

[RoadStress]

I read and...?

Did I have to agree with the solution?

The main issue for me is we need to promote and secure the decentralization, and now Bitcoin is more centralized than the banking system. A single guy not a company or a group single people controls 1%+ of the system and most of the system is in a very small club of people this is not decentralized at all and that makes us a weak system simple to attack.

Juan

So you are against rasing the block limits because of the space problem and you don't agree with the blockchain pruning solution? Ok. That makes a lot of sense.