Interesting debate.
First of all, my opinion: I'm in favor of increasing the block size limit in a hard fork, but very much against removing the limit entirely. Bitcoin is a consensus of its users, who all agreed (or will need to agree) to a very strict set of rules that would allow people to build global decentralized payment system. I think very few people understand a forever-limited block size to be part of these rules.
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My suggestion would be a one-time increase to perhaps 10 MiB or 100 MiB blocks (to be debated), and after that an at-most slow exponential further growth. This would mean no for-eternity limited size, but also no way for miners to push up block sizes to the point where they are in sole control of the network. I realize that some people will consider this an arbitrary and unnecessary limit, but others will probably consider it dangerous already. In any case, it's a compromise and I believe one will be necessary.
Realize that Bitcoin's decentralization only comes from very strict - and sometimes arbitrary - rules (why this particular 50/25/12.5 payout scheme, why ECDSA, why only those opcodes in scripts, ...) that were set right from the start and agreed upon by everyone who ever used the system. Were those rules "central planning" too?
I tend to agree with Pieter.
First of all, the true nature of Bitcoin seems to be the rigid protocol as it helps the credibility among masses. Otherwise one day you remove block size limit, next day remove ECDSA, then change block frequency to 1 per minute, then print more coins. It actually sounds more appropriate to do such changes under a different implementation.
Then I can't help this: With such floating block limit isn't everyone afraid of chain splits? I can imagine a split occurring by a big block being accepted by 60% of the nodes and rejected by the rest.
How about tying the maximum block size to mining difficulty?
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The difficulty also goes up with increasing hardware capabilities, I'd expect that the difficulty increase due to this factor will track the increase of technical capabilities of computers in general.
This sounds interesting.
I think we should put users first. What do users want? They want low transaction fees and fast confirmations.
This comes down to Bitcoin as a payment network versus Bitcoin as a store of value. I thought it was already determined that there will always be better payment networks that function as alternatives to Bitcoin. A user who cares about the store of value use-case, is going to want the network hash rate to be as high as possible. This is at odds with low transaction fees and fast confirmations.
This!
Bitcoin is about citizen empowerment. When ordinary citizen can't run their own validating nodes anymore you lost that feature (independent from the question of hashing). Then bitcoin is commercialized. The bitcoin devs need to keep that in mind. (If you need to freshen up on your brainwash, here's a great presentation from Rick Falkvinge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjmuPqkVwWc)
+100
For me a Neewb, I was attracted to Bitcoin due to it's decentralized nature and the ability for anyone to mine, We already have centralised currency systems that have been corrupted and do not work for the people, so please can we stay away from that paradime, I know it is the natural evolution of organisations to do so but these systems always become self serving, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Now that things have progressed it seems hopeless for an average guy to be able to compete or make and money mining, Even considering I have experience in sysadmin and can pick up some nice dual quad-core xeon servers, It'd be nice if average nerd could still make some money and contribute to the decentralization and transaction processing of the network, with the kind of hardware now being disposed of by corporations. For me I do not care if transaction fees are a little higher or if transactions take longer,, I do care about how centralized the transaction power is and who has control of it.
