[bitcoin-dev] A summary list of all concerns related to not rising the block size

[Geir Harald Hansen]

3) A few more people begin using bitcoin. Bitcoin buckles and dies.

- Something happens a few months from now causing an influx of new users
and more transactions.
- Blocks are constantly full.
- A backlog of transactions keeps growing indefinitely.
- At first people say "bitcoin is slow". After a while they say "bitcoin
doesn't work".
- Changing the hard limit on block size requires a fork and takes too long.
- As bitcoin no longer works people stop using it.
- Bitcoin lives out the last of its days in the backwaters of the
internet with only 5 users. They keep telling people "we increased the
block size now". Unfortunately noone is listening anymore.
- People laugh at you and say "I told you that buttcoin thing was doomed
to fail. After all it wasn't real money."

If the hard limit had been increased earlier then mining pools would
have been able to react quickly by upping their own soft limit. But this
was not the case and so ended Bitcoin.

So in summary:

By increasing the block size limit you run the risk of:
- The transaction fee market takes a little longer to develop.
By not increasing the limit you run the risk of:
- Bitcoin dies. The end.

Transaction fees should not be the main topic of this discussion, and
probably not even a part of it at all. That seems outright irresponsible
to me.

Regards,
Geir H. Hansen, Bitminter mining pool

On 12.08.2015 11:59, Jorge Timón via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> I believe all concerns I've read can be classified in the following groups:
> 
>> 1) Potential indirect consequence of rising fees.
> 
> - Lowest fee transactions (currently free transactions) will become
> more unreliable.
> - People will migrate to competing systems (PoW altcoins) with lower fees.
> 
>> 2) Software problem independent of a concrete block size that needs to
>> be solved anyway, often specific to Bitcoin Core (ie other
>> implementations, say libbitcoin may not necessarily share these
>> problems).
> 
> - Bitcoin Core's mempool is unbounded in size and can make the program
> crash by using too much memory.
> - There's no good way to increase the fee of a transaction that is
> taking too long to be mined without the "double spending" transaction
> with the higher fee being blocked by most nodes which follow Bitcoin
> Core's default policy for conflicting spends replacements (aka "first
> seen" replacement policy).
> 
> I have started with the 3 concerns that I read more often, but please
> suggest more concerns for these categories and suggest other
> categories if you think there's more.
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