On 06/26/2015 02:23 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote:
Failure to plan now for a hard fork increase 6(?) months in the future
produces that lumpy, unpredictable market behavior.
The market has baked in the years-long behavior of low fees. From the
market PoV, inaction does lead to precisely that, a sudden change over
the span of a few months.
Which market participants are you referring to?
I entered the bitcoin market with open eyes, aware that it faces hard
scalability challenges by design. I was also aware that because of these
challenges, eventually transaction fees would have to rise.
Nevertheless, I made the decision to invest because of the utility I
gain from the anti-censorship, privacy, control, store of value, and
security aspects of bitcoin -- many of which stem from
decentralization, which others have demonstrated to be linked to the
block size.
On the other hand, there are undoubtedly other market participants who
heard hype about "zero fee transactions to anywhere in the world",
believed it would scale, and made (mal)investments as a result.
As for how many market participants of each flavor, and how deep their
respective pockets, who knows? My experience in markets has lead me to
realize that it's never wise to assume I know what "the market" does and
doesn't know. If Jeff Garzik is right about what the market has priced
in, then yes, filled blocks will be rocking the boat. But who's to say
that the smartest, biggest investors and traders don't already see this
scaling problem, and have already priced it in? In this case, a sudden
large increase in the block size is actually rocking the boat. The point
is, you can't know either way, so trying to pre-empt the market in this
way is erroneous.
Regarding entrepreneurial investment specifically, why should we favor
the entrepreneurs who require a more centralized bitcoin over those who
were more considerate of the possibility of rising transaction fees when
making their business models?
In my mind, we should favor neither, which is why I'm basically in
agreement with Pieter that this sense of "emergency" shouldn't really be
a part of the debate.
Not that I'm taking a stand on the specific block size issue either way.
I just think this particular line of reasoning (presupposing what
information the market has and has not already baked in) is unsound.
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