Why change?
Bitcoin, as it currently stands, has never operated under a permanent EFFECTIVE limit on block size. The original 1Mb limitation put there by Satoshi 5 years ago has not been effective up until recently, but instead smaller soft limits (250Kb, 500Kb, 750Kb) were all hit and raised in order for Bitcoin to continue. This has proven to work and gained value.
Capping Bitcoin at the permanent EFFECTIVE limit of 1Mb is a CHANGE to how Bitcoin has operated for the last 5 years and has no precedents in history and in altcoin space to gauge on the effects of such behavior. Similarly, Bitcoin has never operated under an exponentially growing limit or the one that is being voted on by the miners.
The static hard limit on the block size is the only measure that non-mining full nodes have in order to prevent themselves from being pushed outside of the consensus network by profit-driven miners, which (no matter how benevolent) may have no other choice as to keep increasing the capacity and consolidate in order to break even.
So, we are now in a paradoxical situation, where NOT CHANGING Bitcoin actually means CHANGING THE WAY it has operated all this time. We have simply run out of smaller soft limits that were timely increased in the past and are now approaching the hard limit of 1Mb, which requires a different procedure to continue (hard fork).
Why 8Mb?
Despite the fact that many refuse to acknowledge this, Bitcoin isn't alone in the space that it has created for itself. There are competing crypto-currencies based on the exact same principles, that offer significantly larger pre-fork capacity than that of Bitcoin today. As a matter of fact, Bitcoin's closest PoW competitor can handle as much as 4x the transaction volume on a single transparent unified ledger without having to change anything at all.
So, shooting for anything less than an 8x increase will simply jeopardize Bitcoin's position as a leader in this space and won't justify the hassle of a hard fork. Going for the higher limit obviously has drastic implications on network's ability to converge consistently on a single chain, significantly disadvantages Chinese miners and puts existing home-based full nodes at risk of being permanently pushed outside of the consensus network.
It's a game of Chess and now is Bitcoin's turn to make a move.
How to proceed with the change when consensus is reached?
As we already have a simple and robust mechanism in place to statically cap the block size, the change to the code must be trivial (a one-line patch) and thus doesn't require an expertise of professional software developers in order to implement. I believe that community has enough members capable of building the existing Bitcoin software and can provide multiple recent versions of the client with the new hard limit (8Mb) baked in.
If you are presented with a binary choice where options (Core-1Mb-forever vs XT-upto-8Gb) are actively being argued and pushed upon, chances are, that neither is the correct solution and the truth has been kept outside of the loop. Vote with your feet, while you are still given that option, but be careful not to vote yourselves outside of the consensus network. You simply won't be able to vote yourselves back in anymore.
What does the future hold for us?
The new hard limit will have to be revised in time, probably somewhere around 2020. It can become a good tradition to re-evaluate the grounds that Bitcoin is standing on every 4 years before the halving celebration, assess the competitive landscape and the state of technological advancements (networks, storage, processing), reconcile the issues that are currently on the table and find appropriate solutions to move forward with.
There is no such thing as a permanent solution. Everything changes, everything evolves, everything adapts. There is no alternative to hard work either. It would seem that with recent BIP1xx proposals people simply want to get lazy and have a free ride on Bitcoin's back, while at the same time willing to risk the opportunity and the choice they are given to take responsibility for their own future.
This is your call and your job, bitcoiners. Prove that you, as a consensus-driven community. are worthy to have an invention as brilliant as Bitcoin.
Topic: Justifications for 8Mb block size increase. (Read 361 times)
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