Actually, he did.   But just like us, Satoshi didn't have any crystal ball, and thus no way to objectively determine what the block limit should actually be.  We can take an average of the transactions over the past four years, but that would not account for either protocol enforcible contracts nor transaction scripting that is likely to eventually increase the average size of transactions.  Nor would it account for many-in-many-out transactions that would only become common in the context of some large companies' weekly payroll.  The problem is that we don't know what the future holds, and can only make educated guesses as to how bitcoin will be used in the future.  There is no precedent for any of this guys, try to remember that we are all pioneers in this field and no one really has any applicable experience to guide us.

Satoshi chose a hard limit of 1 meg as an arbitrary design decision, effectively putting off the issue till the future, wherein hopefully there would be more useful data to make a more informed decision.  Unfortunately, we really don't have better data; at least not data that we know how to use for this purpose.  And since Satoshi left, we really don't have a tiebreaker to make a final decision when we can't come to a consensus.  Thus, what we are left with is some measure of dissent no matter what we choose to do.  The soft limit really was a short term convention.  Can we come to a decision regarding that first?  That is actually more pressing.  Should we permit the miners to double that soft limit, comment out the soft limit altogether, or include passive/aggressive enforcement rules to the vanilla clients in order to punish violators, or nothing at all.  Bear in mind, nothing is the default condition and that is what we will get with gridlock.

Once again, we're all really just guessing.  I suppose time will tell which one of us was the luckiest guesser.

So you're saying that we have at least 6 months?

Or are you saying that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future returns?

Or, perhaps, both?

Again, we're just guessing.  Did that transaction volume increase because there are 5 times as many active users?  Or was the metoric rise of Satoshi Dice the greater factor?  If the latter, how many times is that going to happen?  Truth be told, I've suspected that Satoshi Dice was set up the way it was in order to function as a block transaction padding system.

You don't understand the soft limit.

And if that does happen, at that predicted time, the developers will have a much better idea of exactly how much to raise the hard limit by then, so setting the actual value of the #define can be a last moment thing just before they all compile the upgrade that fixes it.

Right now we don't even know whether it even will hit that limit that soon, and the soft limits make it pretty much impossible (more transaction fees than there are bitcoins to pay them with, I was told) to actually hit the hard limit.

(Admittedly, commenting out the soft limits would be a cheaper method of reaching the hard limit, but what percent of hashing power has done that so far? At what rate is how much hashing power doing it? By the end of the year how much percent of hasing power will have done it?)

Now don't panic about that "#define at the last moment" bit, I am thinking in terms of Gavin having obtained from us all by then a range of values and possibly a range of network conditions affecting the decision as to the final number to plug in, not that he will by fiat pull a whole different new number out of his ass that hadn't even come up in the discussions carried out between now and the end of the year*.

* "end of the year": an alias for "the time the fix is compiled for release"..

-MarkM-

How many times can it happen? A few orders of magnitude more times.

How many potential customers does Mega have compared to Satoshi Dice? What happens if a blockchain-based game takes off in Japan, China or India? Do you think 2013 is going to be better or worse for BitPay and Coinbase than 2012 now that they've got high-profile customers like Wordpress and Reddit. Where's the tipping point where web business owners have heard so much positive news about bitcoin that a bunch of them decide to jump in en masse?

We are guessing, but we know that up until now the number of lily pads at least doubles every day and the pond is about 25% covered already.

All this might have to happen in a frantic week!
I think it is terribly sanguine to just assume that alternate chains can appear quickly and integrate seamlessly alongside the main blockchain. This is extremely speculative. We need some of these alt-chains to be up and running right now, taking volume, and proving themselves. Is coinbase an "alt-chain" in your example?

markm. You seem to advocate waiting until the last minute before executing the hard-fork. Yes, more information will be available to set the increased value/formula, but surely in opensource the best hard-fork is one that is executed as early as possible so that people can upgrade at their convenience.

The lily pads are increasing 10-fold per year (500 transactions per day in Jan 2011, 5000 per day in Jan 2012, 50000 per day in Jan 2013. Jan 2014 will require 1.8Mb blocks if that continues. Yes SD could be throttled or killed, yet I think it is doing bitcoin a favor, by highlighting this issue "within the community". It would be different if it was Mega or Wordpress racking up the volume.

Oh nice, an actual number, thanks! And it is less than a doubling of the max size, too!

Thanks. There ya go Gavin, we got a times two so far for, likely, the bottom of the range of values to have at your fingertips when time comes to type the proverbial #define



Sounds like maybe the times 1.5 each year won't cut it, but times two per eighteen months might still be in the running.

-MarkM-