The fact is that it's the Bitcoin Foundation camp which wants to change the direction of Bitcoin toward a centralized monolith which is diametrically opposed to what a lot of us early adopters saw as Bitcoin's potential promise. They are trying to gently turn the ship to get it into the vortex with panicking the lemmings.
The Sidechains proposal, to the extent that it needs to even steer Bitcoin at all, is very modest. Certainly not on par with the suggestion of hard-forking Bitcoin to make transaction rates and resource usage grow without limit.
So much FUD and misdirection in this post.
Bitcoin has grown in spite of the production quota on transaction processing because it hasn't reached the rate at which the quota becomes effective.
Allowing that artificial quota to limit the transaction rate is the radical experiment, taking us into uncharted economic territory.
Pffft! WTF do you think Bitcoin is supposed to run on when the inflation (block reward) is used up?
There is nothing 'radical' and 'experimantal' about transaction fees. They were part of the design. You, my friend, are engaging in the FUD here.
There are no good economic arguments for magic constants that ration the transaction rate, just handwaving about "centralization".
Nobody in the "keep the blocks a 1 MB forever" camp has ever bothered to put out a clear description of what the problems with growth are, what are the precise causes, and all the possible ways to deal with them.
They just keep shouting their "centralization" fnord.
I just saw Gavin say in the same AMA summary that TOR was the answer for security (highly dubious to me, but anyway...) while he proposed increasing the block rate. He forgot to mention that the 1MB block size falls just under what seems to be supportable by TOR at the moment.
He forgot to mention that his proposal is exponential. As I read Gavin's article
here, I almost think he is saying "
Remeber that CFR thing? They got me. Run for the hills fellow Bitcoiners" It's that absurd to me.
Andresen posited that the 50% annual growth rate he suggested would enable the distributed network to facilitate as many as 400 million transactions per day if implemented now. After 12 years, the bitcoin network’s estimated transaction capacity would reach 56 billion transactions per day, according to Andresen’s initial calculations.
- 12 years is about 2x the current age of Bitcoin.
- 56,000,000,000 transactions is about 90,000x the current 600,000 TPD.
You can judge for yourself how much technology has advances between 2009 and 2015 and extrapolate that out then decide how, given the struggles Bitcoin has had meeting it's current 7TPS, it's going to swallow 650,000TPS. But don't worry...it's just 'initial calculations.'
