Can somebody explain this to me like I'm a 5 year old:
XT is supposed to make bitcoin futureproof, but how is it going to achieve that, when it can be spammed up to ~1.15gb / day, meaning that it'll take just 100 days for a determined attacker to increase the blockchain to +115gb, and around a year to take it up half a terabyte.
Terabyte hard drives are standard now. A year from now 5 TB drives will be standard. That's a worst case scenario and could still be easily handled.
The worst case scenario is that someone starts spamming the blockchain with the 8mb blocks. Then, next thing you know, people will say "ohh these 8mb blocks are full, we need bigger blocks". Then you get 20mb blocks and ~3gb/day of bloat / >1 tb per year. And who is to stop them spamming the 20mb blocks and getting them full too? What's next? We'll be asking for 100mb blocks? This is madness.
Personally I don't believe that even the 750k/1mb blocks are full by legitimate transactions and not bogus transactions. I believe these bogus transactions are created to stir a "debate" about "ohh we need bigger blocks" and stuff so that we can then go on and shoot ourselves in the foot by "accepting" larger blocks as the "natural evolution".
We have to deal with a reality here: Big banks, credit cards, swift etc, don't want BTC to succeed. Bloating it is a very cheap way they can use to kill it. It's much cheaper than a 51% and cheaper than manipulating the BTC market. And it will be
FAAAAAAAAAR cheaper to enable that attack vector with 8mb or 20mb blocks.
1MB blocks actually incentivize a spammer, as we saw during the tx spam exercises of the last weeks. Reason: it's much cheaper to do. Spammers get their transactions (and attached fees) kicked out of the mempool after not getting into maxed out blocks. This allows them to just do it over and over again, much more cheaply than if those tx were actually included in a block with their fees collected by the miners. The scenario you propose would be much more expensive to sustain with larger blocks, with that increased expense going to the miners.
Node concentration is a concern with more demanding requirements for running a full node, and should not be ignored, but staying at 2.7 tx per second to infinity is potentially much more damaging to this grand experiment. We'll never know how it might impact node count and concentration unless we do a modest increase and measure the result.
The intransigence and vitriol coming from MP, the PR gal, and his toadies is a sign of the weakness inherent in their position. Rather than appeal to reasoned judgement, it devolves into name calling and fear mongering in a grand ego stroking exercise. There will be no larger blocks unless 75% of solved blocks are made by nodes supporting >1MB, this means consensus will have already happened, and the orphaned chain will die quickly as <25% of hashing power will face an impossible difficulty. My prediction is that the 25% will quickly upgrade so they are mining the chain that will actually be worth something.
There's no question this debate and stalemate has been impacting confidence in the exchange rate, and rightly so. On a positive note, once this is settled and Bitcoin has a tx throughput that isn't laughable for a global p2p digital cash system... the fear dissolves and we can dust off those old moon boots.
