Burn, Baby. Burn.
There is no guarantee Bitcoin can be saved, but in CANNOT be saved without a crash that wakes up everyone to the threat of the smallblockers.
Fuckin' smallblocker Satoshi who didn't realize that dust/spam payments aren't practical...
Bitcoin isn't currently practical for very small micropayments. Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01. The dust spam limit is a first try at intentionally trying to prevent overly small micropayments like that.
Bitcoin is practical for smaller transactions than are practical with existing payment methods. Small enough to include what you might call the top of the micropayment range. But it doesn't claim to be practical for arbitrarily small micropayments.
Forgot to add the good part about micropayments. While I don't think Bitcoin is practical for smaller micropayments right now, it will eventually be as storage and bandwidth costs continue to fall. If Bitcoin catches on on a big scale, it may already be the case by that time. Another way they can become more practical is if I implement client-only mode and the number of network nodes consolidates into a smaller number of professional server farms. Whatever size micropayments you need will eventually be practical. I think in 5 or 10 years, the bandwidth and storage will seem trivial.
I am not claiming that the network is impervious to DoS attack. I think most P2P networks can be DoS attacked in numerous ways. (On a side note, I read that the record companies would like to DoS all the file sharing networks, but they don't want to break the anti-hacking/anti-abuse laws.)
If we started getting DoS attacked with loads of wasted transactions back and forth, you would need to start paying a 0.01 minimum transaction fee. 0.1.5 actually had an option to set that, but I took it out to reduce confusion. Free transactions are nice and we can keep it that way if people don't abuse them.
It would be nice to keep the blk*.dat files small as long as we can.
The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets.
But for now, while it's still small, it's nice to keep it small so new users can get going faster. When I eventually implement client-only mode, that won't matter much anymore.
There's more work to do on transaction fees. In the event of a flood, you would still be able to jump the queue and get your transactions into the next block by paying a 0.01 transaction fee.
Blocks are full with spam/dust => "oh no the end of the world is coming", yet the predicted design to bump fees and bypass the spam is working as it should (with less fees - as value per BTC has increased).
All the arguments about the good anti-core forkers who want the best for the small guy so that he can make micropayments for free / almost free against the "evil blockstream employees" seem to go out the window in light of what Satoshi himself said about the design.
It seems Satoshi was of the belief that eventually technological resources will be boosted to a level that the existing design can scale even for micropayments, when currently it can't. What he expected is 100% probable (give it a few decades at most and VISA-like tx capability will be easy), however I suspect he was expecting some kind of non-linear breakthrough sometime soon - that hasn't yet been invented (?) or mass implemented as of today.
He was also of the opinion that there is no need for the blockchain to be bloated and his preference was to keep it relatively small, in order to boost adoption and prevent centralization. He offered an alternative "design" where a much more centralized bitcoin with nodes in server farms could take over and people would be running light clients.
People just repeating "big blocks" remind me of the movie Idiocracy with the "electrolytes".
