It is not "fear" of fee pressure. 1) Blocks are mostly not-full on average.
2) Absent long blocks and stress tests, there is little fee pressure above the anti-spam relay fee metric, because of #1. 3) As such, inducing fee pressure is a delta, a change from years-long bitcoin economic policy. Each time we approach the soft limit, Bitcoin Core increases the soft limit to prevent "full" blocks. Mike Hearn et. al. lobbies miners to upgrade. (note - this is not an endorsement of these actions - it is a neutral observation) 4) Inaction leads to consistent fee pressure as the months tick on and system volume grows; thus, inaction leads to economic policy change. 5) Economic policy change leads to market and software disruption. The market and software - notably wallets - is not prepared for this. 6) If you want to change economic policy, that's fine. But be honest and admit you are arguing for a change, a delta from current market expectations and behavior. 7) It is critical to first deal with what _is_, not what you wish the world to be. You want a fee market to develop. There is nothing wrong with that desire. It remains a delta from where we are today, and that is critically relevant in a $3b+ market. On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 7:09 AM, Pieter Wuille <pieter.wui...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello all, > > here I'm going to try to address a part of the block size debate which has > been troubling me since the beginning: the reason why people seem to want > it. > > People say that larger blocks are necessary. In the long term, I agree - > in the sense that systems that do not evolve tend to be replaced by other > systems. This evolution can come in terms of layers on top of Bitcoin's > blockchain, in terms of the technology underlying various aspects of the > blockchain itself, and also in the scale that this technology supports. > > I do, however, fundamentally disagree that a fear for a change in > economics should be considered to necessitate larger blocks. If it is, and > there is consensus that we should adapt to it, then there is effectively no > limit going forward. This is similar to how Congress voting to increase the > copyright term retroactively from time to time is really no different from > having an infinite copyright term in the first place. This scares me. > > Here is how Gavin summarizes the future without increasing block sizes in > PR 6341: > > > 1. Transaction confirmation times for transactions with a given fee will > rise; very-low-fee transactions will fail to get confirmed at all. > > 2. Average transaction fee paid will rise > > 3. People or applications unwilling or unable to pay the rising fees > will stop submitting transactions > > 4. People and businesses will shelve plans to use Bitcoin, stunting > growth and adoption > > Is it fair to summarize this as "Some use cases won't fit any more, people > will decide to no longer use the blockchain for these purposes, and the > fees will adapt."? > > I think that is already happening, and will happen at any scale. I believe > demand for payments in general is nearly infinite, and only a small portion > of it will eventually fit on a block chain (independent of whether its size > is limited by consensus rules or economic or technological means). > Furthermore, systems that compete with Bitcoin in this space already offer > orders of magnitude more capacity than we can reasonably achieve with any > blockchain technology at this point. > > I don't know what subset of use cases Bitcoin will cater to in the long > term. They have already changed - you see way less betting transactions > these days than a few years ago for example - and they will keep changing, > independent of what effective block sizes we end up with. I don't think we > should be afraid of this change or try to stop it. > > If you look at graphs of block sizes over time (for example, > http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=498), it seems to me that there is very little > "organic" growth, and a lot of sudden changes (which could correspond to > changing defaults in miner software, introduction of popular > sites/services, changes in the economy). I think these can be seen as the > economy changing to full up the available space, and I believe these will > keep happening at any size effectively available. > > None of this is a reason why the size can't increase. However, in my > opinion, we should do it because we believe it increases utility and > understand the risks; not because we're afraid of what might happen if we > don't hurry up. And from that point of view, it seems silly to make a huge > increase at once... > > -- > Pieter > > > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev > >
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