Than would it be worth it, to take a portion of the transaction fees and distribute them to the owners of the full nodes. After all they are contributing just as much to the security of bitcoin.

This softens the effect of a mining monopoly that is currently highly centralized.

The cost to make a transaction should be equilibrium point at the intersection of the supply curve and the demand curve.

I'm not sure who constitutes the mysterious "some" you're talking about. Do you have a link to a specific post?

This is not about microtransactions, at least not in the sense most people understand that word. With the current 1 MB limit per block, the number of transactions is capped at around 7 per second, which roughly translates into 200 million transactions per year. So, if there were 20 million users of Bitcoin in the whole world (a very conservative estimate of what Bitcoin can achieve), the average user would be able to carry out 10 transactions in a year. Say I wanted to get my salary from my employer and then pay my landlord in bitcoins, that would be 24 transactions in a year. With a 20-million user base, such "microtransactions" as paying a salary or a monthly rent would be off-limits to most people. Even if I was willing to pay a hefty fee to get more blockchain space than your average Joe Bloggs, my landlord would have trouble getting his bitcoins out of the chain and would end up saying "But why don't you just pay me in euros?".

The solution proposed by the "do not change MAX_BLOCK_SIZE" advocates, if I understand them correctly, is that I shouldn't use the blockchain for such mundane transactions. Transactions like paying a rent would be handled through off-chain processors that provide me with BTC tokens. But then I'd be using bitcoins as a mere denomination, like the IMF's SDR or the old European ECU. Certainly not what Bitcoin was designed for. And it's far from certain that Bitcoin could even survive in such a scenario. Why would ordinary people even run Bitcoin nodes if it becomes just an infrastructure for Google/Facebook/Baidu Credits? It would make as much sense as running a SWIFT or LCH.Clearnet node (if these systems worked as distributed networks).

So what?
Thinking about Tor and the current 1MB limit, still seems like a reasonable number to stop at.

So just stop, take a breath, look around and see how the market responded... and then try to improve it further, if needed.
By increasing the block size limit now, you are not improving anything - you are only making transactions cheaper for satoshidice, which is especially stupid when you consider the fact that the transactions are essentially free ATM. As kjj has nicely phrased it, currently the transactions are being added to the chain on a charity basis - why would anyone aim to make them even cheaper, at the cost of an exponential growth in the price of infrastructure required to run a node, or a miner?

IMO the 1MB limit is the best moment to stop this madness, let the fee market work, and just think about the best way to go from there.
If the best solution to the scaling problem the developers have is magnifying the scaling problem, then I am honestly disappointed.

Why you assume that it would need to be Google/Facebook/Baidu Credits?
Why do you think that a bitcoin backed payment processor cannot be built as just yet another lightweight P2P network, protected by a cryptography?

Why do you guys keep repeating that one would be forced to give all his private keys to a bank?

And what blockchain-pruning has to do with making mining available via Tor?

You are right - if it works, then Tor mining should be easier, though the scaling issues of a home node still remain.

Anyway let's at least hope that they will prove the debunking thesis working, before touching the number.
Though after learning that decentralization is not considered as particularly important, I am not so certain about it...


Because for me Bitcoin has already succeeded and increasing the block size is playing with lethal forces that we don't even understand.
So it has succeeded, but if you act irrationally, you can easily screw it up.

So why the rush? Why not let the merchants and users ask for change when the need arises?

This is not a problem, really.

Dedicated servers are so cheap these days you can easily set up a machine in a random country.

Check this out:
http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/

REALLY CHEAP.

You have to understand where he's coming from. He and the Bitcoin Foundation are pushing Bitcoin as a system to do payments on the internet; the recent San Jose conference had the tagline "The future of payments" after all.

It's a lot harder to convince people that investing time and money into implementing Bitcoin for payments is a good idea with a 1MB limit on transactions. Removing the blocksize limit entirely and making it something that miners decide solves that problem from that perspective: regardless of what the demand from transactions are at least one entity will always be able to meet that demand at a cost approaching the cost of bandwidth and servers. That's why Gavin likes to talk a lot about "free market forces" and "competition" when it comes to mining, and has said before he's happy to see the smallest 20% or so of miners and full-node operators get forced out of business by rising costs every year.

From the perspective of someone who wants to accept Bitcoin payments on their online store letting the majority of miners decide what the blocksize is solves the uncertainty of how much transactions will cost. They connect directly to miners to send their transactions and don't care if Bitcoin is controlled by six people or six million. From the perspective of someone investing in Bitcoins because they want a decentralized store-of-value, AKA electronic gold... well they might see things differently.

I still don't see it how they are going to convince the miners to drop the 1MB limit.
Is there even a single mining pool that would not want to see 1MB limit at work, at least for awhile?
When they see it, when they see the size of the incentive the limit gives them, it will make them even more motivated to never unlock it.

Counting on the pool operators that they will just unconsciously start mining version 3 blocks, just because it will be a default setting in bitcoind version 0.8.4 onward...
One would need to think that these people are either stupid or ignorant, which I don't think they are.