The data actually paints a very grim picture of the current bandwidth/validating capacity of the global mining network.
We have preceding blocks as small as 50KB with 30s passing and the miner continues to mine empty blocks via SPV mining.
The most glaring case is Block 370057 where despite 73s elapsing and the preceding block being a mere 131KB, the miner is unable to download/validate fast enough to include transactions in his block.
This is a cause for great concern, because if miners are SPV mining for a whole minute for <750KB blocks, at 8MB blocks, the network will just fall apart as a significant portion of the hashing power SPV mines throughout.
Yes, these pools deserve to lose money but the impact of reorgs and many block orphans for anyone not running a full node could be disastrous, especially more so in the XT world where Mike wants everyone to be running SPV nodes. I simply don't see the XT fork having any chance of surviving if SPV nodes are unreliable.
http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/010283.htmlComedy fest continues
How long until the XT hype dies off?
More comedy? Popcorn supplies...running dangerously low... This season of All My Bitcoins is hotting up nicely! A surprise Satoshi cameo? Or was it!? Are the rumors of an All My Blockchains spin-off true?!
The XT hype died as soon as thermos logged into his subreddit and killed it. Ye Olde Banhammer made short work of the Gavinista Liberation Front. Well to be fair, Szaboshi did put a full clip of high caliber tweets into it earlier in the day. But it was still twitching and making annoying moaning/gurgling/bitching noises. Then the emergence of weaponized version stamps in NotBitcoinXT and PseudoNode made any further discussion pointless guesswork.
"
the impact of reorgs and many block orphans for anyone not running a full node could be disastrous"
"Really using Bitcoin" means doing the full Mulder & Scully: Trust No One.
How many times do we have to say it?
IF YOU ARE NOT RUNNING A FULL NODE, YOU ARE NOT REALLY USING BITCOIN.smooth keeps hyping SPV, and he's right that most people will use it. But that does not imply it is not critically important to preserve for most people the option to access/verify/amplify the Blockchain in a trustless, self-sufficient manner. The network depends on a high enough percentage of 'most people' being able to maintain contributing nodes.
In an emergency (Bitcoin banned by international treaty) or catastrophe (cyberwar goes kinetic; datacenters gone), Bitcoin might become more important than ever, and needs to be small enough to thrive in hosts-of-last-resort like
the rural towns of Côte d'Ivoire