If Core can't find a way to scale the network with a reasonable amount of safety and security in TWO YEARS, then they are incompetent and need to make way for better developers.
How much time is a reasonable amount of time for you? I really want to know. Give me an actual number.
How much time is a reasonable amount of time for you? I really want to know. Give me an actual number.
That is a pretty bold statement about solving a non-trivial computer science problem. I'm sure your patches will be accepted if you have a solution.
I think the problem is that you assume that increasing the blocksize fixes the problem.
I imagine a future where all manner of services that are currently ad-supported or subscription-based might instead be payed for with bitcoin microtransactions, seamlessly and transparently. There could be millions, or maybe even billions of transactions per day from all these page views/minutes of video/etc. - vastly more than even Visa handles at peak capacity. And add to that all the microtransactions that might be generated by devices on the Internet of Things, that none of us know the extent or nature of yet.
I don't see how increasing blocksize will handle this. Even data-center sized nodes may not be able to handle all those microtransactions.
I don't claim to know what the answer is, but I am pretty sure that block-size alone won't do it - and lurching down that path in a non-judicious way could lead to permanent problems that will be painful to work around in the long term, after a real solution is found.
I'm certain blocksize alone WON'T fix all scaling problems, but it would buy us time. All it would take right now is a doubling of transactions to crash the network. This problem was important, but now it's urgent as well. A doubling is well withing the realm of possibility in mere months and is approaching the probable.
Creating a market for transaction fees needs to happen AFTER we reach mainstream adoption or we will never reach it. Yahoo mail, Facebook, Google all knew not to monetize too early. That's why they're still around. I hope we'll be around when billions of cryto microtransactions becomes an issue.
I don't really think that the people resisting block-size increase are just interested in creating a transaction-fee market.
I don't work for Blockstream, nor am I a Core developer - but even I can see that there is potentially a heavy price to be paid (in terms of Bitcoin decentralization) if we rush head-long down the path of block-size for scaling - and this could turn out to be a mistake that can't be undone, AND one that does not really solve the problem in the long-term.
I don't see the urgency you do for raising blocksize right now. Full blocks are still uncommon (except during "stress-tests").
We want users now, we plan to let them join in 3 months stalling block size growth because we dont want centralized nodes 20 years from now is damaging bitcoin - its myopic. If we hit a growth spurt like in 2013 well see a minimum of 10X transaction growth and the fee pressure will increase disproportionately, limited transaction volume will push feed over $1.00 in value for the smallest transactions. Fees will kill the competitive advantage bitcoin is offering.
small blockests think the fee should be around $7. We the users are paying for low fees by subsidizing miners with inflation of 25BTC every 10 minus. we need economics of scale - more users to reduce fess as inflation subsidies diminish. Centralization is a concern, but we have 90% of nodes running centralized code the number is actually irrelevant when the code changes are controlled by a centralized few who believe bitcoin can't scale and want to change it to accommodate off block chain transactions.
