I'm not as connected as some people are to the reddits and githubs and IRC rooms where a lot of the bigwigs talk about this stuff.  Does anyone know if consensus is anywhere close on this block size increase issue?  It doesn't seem off topic here to ask given the direct relation between the attacks/tests and the potential increase.  I know the debate has been rancorous, I wonder if anyone has a gauge on where we stand at the moment on this.


I think it's not entirely clear what you mean by "transaction times".  If you mean "time to block inclusion/first confirmation for a lower fee transaction during a high volume moment" then yes, that's what he's saying.  If you mean the time it takes for a transaction to be propogated by the network, then I don't think so, if anything, passing larger blocks around might add latency to the network (but I'm no expert, I'm just guessing).  What do you mean by "transaction times"?

No sign of consensus as of yesterday.  The "old devs" (Gavin, Mike Hearn, Jeff Garzik) want to increase the limit before the traffic gets close to saturation.  The "new devs" (Adam Back, Greg Maxwell, Peter Wuille, Luke-Jr, and others -- most of them working for Blockstream Inc) want instead to see the network saturate so that a "fee market" develops.  Since it is a discrete (binary, boolean) choice, no compromise is possible.

Gavin backed down from his original 20 MB proposal to 8 MB, starting early next year, with automatic increases afterwards. Jeff proposed a "compromise" plan with 2 MB blocks.  Peter Wuillie made a counter-proposal to increase the limit only in 2017 -- that is, no compromise.

I am not "biased a bit". I think that raising the blocksize LIMIT is necessary and urgent to avoid severe degradation of bitcoins usability.  It should have been a no-brainer non-event, if the developers affiliated with Blockstream had not dumped a huge mountain of FUD in its way.  

From all that I read, I concluded that the arguments against it, like the alleged risk of centralization, are ridiculous excuses.  To me it is obvious that the Blockstream guys simply want the network to become saturated, as soon as possible and at any cost, and don't give a damn about what that would mean for its users.  In fact they want to convert the network from its original goal (peer-to-peer payments without the need of trusted middlemen) to a totally different purpose (the settlement layer of their overlay network) without the knowledge, much less the consent, of all the other players -- by abusing their control of the Core implementation.  

Perhaps the Blockstream guys genuinely believe that the Lightning Network will be viable and working in six month's time, and will be much better than bitcoin as it is now.  However, I am increasingly doubtful of that.  They cannot be so naive.  Perhaps they just intend to push all users to companies like Coinbase and Circle.

I don't have particular admiration for Gavin, Mike Hearn, or Jeff Garzik, but I believe that in this issue they are just trying to do what the Core devs should be doing:  keep bitcoin usable for its original purpose, at least as well as it has worked so far, for a few more years.  

The attacks only come occassionally, which lowers the percent even more. I mean people will fear that a spam attack can start everytime and will use higher fees even without attacks. The stop and go is simply a cheaper way of raising the overall fee.

I think the fee might be a reason, even though some say that theory is debunked. Even with the spammer having a disadvantage against nonspammy miners, maybe the spammer has ways to create their mining hardware cheaper than competition. Getting more money will lead to more miners and might still outcompete the upgrades of the nonspammy competition.

Besides that, it might be someone trying to lower the bitcoin price.

By the way. I found this site incredibly useful for finding out how much fee to pay: http://www.cointape.com/ It can show when spam attacks go on too of course.

I don't think fee saturation is necessary/beneficial until the block solve reward has halved several more times.  Right now fees are such a small percentage of the total block reward that they could, essentially, be ignored.

We are obviously under a stress test, well, call it attack:


https://blockchain.info/address/1mtgoxNrDZgrs6zP1MdEToSNTAeeeU2VH

If this isn't a huge spamfest attack then i don't know what it is. I wonder who is the low life running this kind of shit all day.

Well, yes, they agreed to 8MB, in a document signed and sealed with red star stamps and all.  However, they added afterwards that they do not like the idea of switching to XT, and hope that the Core devs and Gavin&Co will reach an agreement.

Well , "biased" here doesn't mean his reasoning isn't valid, maybe the word is wrong. A person here has asked about what's the current state of blocksize debate, Jorge answered in a manner which clearly shows his attitude towards blocksize naysayers (nearly accusing them of conspiracy because of their employment at Blockstream). I just wanted to argue that it's likely not a no-brainer situation (that is my opinion on which I and Jorge disagree) and pointed the reader to the mailing list discussion so he can make his own opinion.

I don't think there's anything left to discuss with regards to my post.

Maybe someone is simply testing how well the network can react on that. I think the nodes still need to keep all these transactions in RAM. Which might be a problem.

I wonder if it is related to the max blocksize limit debate.

Hm, i wonder why someone tries this. Isn't it that the fees needed to include these transactions are higher than the outputs? If you try to do it with a lower fee than miners would accept then it will be useless. Or the one collecting the funds owns a mining farm and knows that these transactions will be included. But that makes no sense too since a miner of that size would not bother with pennies. And he would lose coins by including these transactions instead transactions that pay a fee.

So the one doing is makes a thing that does not look smart to me.