Quoting myself from another thread.... given a bit of data, I think 12x average utilization is probably a very good target for a maximum utilization. It seems to work for VISA (most of the time, at any rate). That would put us at 3600KB blocks for now, and if there's a "phase shift" where utilization suddenly goes up by a factor of 100, we'd be able to adapt within a couple of weeks, meaning before the opportunity is completely gone.
Really, what I'm worried about is the 'phase shift' scenario. I've worked at a bunch of startups, and when a new thing hits, it tends to hit suddenly and hard. At a completely unpredictable time, after/during years of hard work during which you don't know whether it's going to happen let alone when.
If Bitcoin goes mainstream, it will not do so gradually; it will be a phase shift where, a few months after 'a few' people are using it here and there, 'everybody' is using it all the time.
I think we need an adaptive limit because the exponential growth outlined by Gavin is too slow to handle that kind of rapid phase shift. It's the right shape for the curve, but the curve happens over a period of twenty weeks, not over a period of twenty years. And you never know when the curve you need to respond to is ready to begin. Not being ready to roll out and scale, QUICKLY, could result in missing it when the opportunity does happen. Scaling in advance of need, on the other hand, simply invites the waste of resources.
All that said, yes, I am STILL in favor of raising the block size limit, whether it is done the way I'd prefer it, or not. As far as I'm concerned, this proposal is still "HELL YES" even though I think I might know a better way to do it, because not doing either thing would make failure certain.
VISA only has an average txn capacity of 2,000 tps but their network can handle a peak traffic of 24,000 tps. Nobody designs a system with a specific limit and then assumes throughput will be equal to that upper limit.
That is a very valuable observation. An 'adaptive' block size limit would set a limit of some multiple of the observed transaction rate, but most of its advocates (including me) haven't bothered to look up what the factor ought to be. what you looked up above presents real live information from a functioning payment system.
The lesson being that an acceptable peak txn rate for a working payment network is about 12x its average txn rate.
Which, in our case with average blocks being around 300 KB, means we ought to have maximum block sizes in the 3600KB range.
And that those of us advocating a self-adjusting block size limit ought to be thinking in terms of 12x the observed utilization, not 3x the observed utilization.