On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxw...@gmail.com> wrote: > I hope that should it become necessary to do so that correct path will > be obvious to everyone, otherwise there is a grave risk of undermining > the justification for the confidence in the immutability of any of the > rules of the system.
With all I wrote on the gloom side— I thought I should elaborate how I think that would work, assuming that my gloom isn't convincingly disproven. It's the year 2043— the Y2038 problem is behind us and everyone is beginning to forget how terrible it turned out to be— By some amazing chance Bitcoin still exists and is widely used. Off-chain system like fidelity bonded banks are vibrant and widely used providing scalable instant and completely private transactions to millions of people. Someone posts to the infrequently used IETF Bitcoin working group with a new draft— It points out that the transaction load is high enough that even with a 100x increase in block size completion for fees would hardly be impacted and that— because computers are 2^20 times faster per unit cost than they were in 2013— and networks had made similar gains, so even a common wristwatch (the personal computer embedded in everyone's wrist at birth) could easily keep up with 100 megabyte blocks.... so the size should be increased as of block 2,047,500. The only objections are filed by some bearded hippy at the museum of internet trolling (their authentic reconstruction of Diablo-D3's desktop exhibit couldn't keep up), and by some dictatorship who again insists that their communist PeoplesCoin should be used instead— the usual suspects. And so, after a couple years of upgrades, it is so. Or perhaps more likely— it would get revised along side a hardforking cryptosystem upgrade (e.g. replacing sha256 in the hash trees with SHA-4-512), thus amortizing out all the migration costs... The trickiness and risk of changing it— of economic problems, of the risk of undermining trust in the immutability of the system's rules— only exists if there is genuine, considered, and honest controversy about the parameters. At the moment any increase would be sure to be controversial: common hardware and networks would not obviously keep up with our current maximum size, and our current transaction load doesn't produce a usable fees market. This cannot remain true forever. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
