Greg, I believe Jeff is focusing on BtcDrak's proposal ( https://gist.github.com/btcdrak/1c3a323100a912b605b5 ) where the increased nBits are used to vote for the block size to raise permanently ( or until it gets voted down). His arguments don't seem to apply to your original proposal (where the size is only increased for that block).
On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 7:57 PM, Gregory Maxwell via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Jeff Garzik <jgar...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Expanding on pay-with-diff and volatility (closing comment), >> >> Users and miners will have significant difficulty creating and/or predicting >> a stable block size (and fee environment) with pay-with-diff across the >> months. The ability of businesses to plan is low. Chaos and >> unpredictability are bad in general for markets and systems. Thus the >> binary conclusion of "not get used" or "volatility" > > Sorry, I'm still not following. I agree that predictability is important. > > I don't follow where unpredictability is coming from here. Most (all?) > of the difficulty based adjustments had small limits on the difficulty > change that wouldn't have substantially changed the interblock times > relative to orphaning. > >> It's written as 'a' and/or 'b'. If you don't have idle hashpower, then >> paying with difficulty requires some amount of collusion ('a') >> Any miner paying with a higher difficulty either needs idle hashpower, or >> self-increase their own difficulty at the possible opportunity cost of >> losing an entire block's income to another miner who doesn't care about >> changing the block size. The potential loss does not economically >> compensate for size increase gains in most cases, when you consider the >> variability of blocks (they come in bursts and pauses) and the fee income >> that would be associated > > What the schemes propose is blocksize that increases fast with > difficulty over a narrow window. The result is that your odds of > producing a block are slightly reduced but the block you produce if > you do is more profitable: but only if there is a good supply of > transactions which pay real fees compariable to the ones you're > already taking. The same trade-off exists at the moment with respect > to orphaning risk and miners still produce large blocks, producing a > larger block means a greater chance you're not successful (due to > orphaning) but you have a greater utility. The orphing mediated risk > is fragile and can be traded off for centeralization advantage or by > miners bypassing validation, issues which at least so far we have no > reason to believe exist for size mediated schemes. > > As you know, mining is not a race (ignoring edge effects with > orphaning/propagation time). Increasing difficulty does not put you at > an expected return disavantage compared to other miners so long as the > income increases at least proportionally (otherwise pooling with low > diff shares would be an astronomically losing proposition :)!). > > Pay-for-size schemes have been successfully used in some altcoins > without the effects you're suggesting. > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev