OK, so now I see some bitcoin war having a chance to pop up in a near future. People vs corporations?
It's not good, and I surely hope to stand on the right side.
Though, I don't think it's likely for me to move to the enemy camp, unless they just force me. But I will surely try to fight, FWIW, because I want to have a bitcoin node in my home 10 years from now. I mean, without a need to have also an A/C to cool it

I'll just post this again from retep's ridiculous video thread, since I don't see enough people arguing the point about Moore's law.  Moore's law means that even with no blocksize limit, we will be able to store the blockchain on PCs forever.

The blockchain is not currently increasing in size linearly in a straight line, as you can see here:
http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

It is increasing exponentially because we are in the adoption stage where more users are added.  Once bitcoin reaches its potential market size, or once it hits a blocksize limit, the blockchain size will increase linearly.  We will never see sustained exponential growth in the number of monetary transactions that humans need to conduct.

Bitcoin merchant adoption and transaction fees have grown 1000% over last year, which is an extremely high rate that temporarily outpaces hard drive capacity growth, but this cannot be sustained very long.  Hard drive space and internet speed show no signs of slowing their exponential growth rates, so they will always outpace the bitcoin blockchain in the long run.  Exponential growth will always win out over linear growth.  People will be able to store the blockchain on their personal computers forever.  Removing the blocksize limit doesn't change that.

There was a recent article in Bitcoin Magazine that analysed the blockchain size, but most of their articles are not available online.  The article looked at some worst case scenarios, and even using really conservative estimates, 20 years from now people will easily be able to store the whole blockchain on their phone and download the whole thing in a few hours.

Hard drive capacity over time:

World internet bandwith over time:


World internet bandwidth is smashing the pace of Moore's law.  Tor bandwidth also follows Moore's law.

1980:  300 baud
1990: 14.4k
2000: 384k dsl
2010: 20mb cable
2013: 1000mb fiber

Storage capacity is also likely to have radical breakthroughs that smash the pace of Moore's law.

Eventually it will dawn on the business types that only a handful of entities are capable of consuming the whole pie, and that if Bitcoin proper can remain a rock solid core there will be many many slices of pie which will be plenty big enough to keep them busy.  At least those who's primary interest is economic.

Admittedly it is bit presumptuous for me to play business guy however.  It is probably true that one can be severely dis-advantaged by jurisdictional differences in a marketplace which is truly global.

Wishful thinking.

If censorship was a problem, that would be because hashing power was under the control of authorities, who would simply use that hashing power to 51% attack the censorship resistant Bitcoin. Changing the PoW algorithm doesn't help either, as new coins haven't been able to survive 51% attacks by people having fun, let alone focused attacks, for a long time.

We've got one shot at getting a decentralized PoW-based consensus system implemented. Don't screw it up.

If a >50% attack is a problem, it won't matter what the block size is, unless you're suggesting a mechanism by which larger blocks leads to authorities getting hold of hashing power..?

He doesn't mean that and in any case, a parallel chain could use merged-mining.

Larger blocks lead to it being increasingly difficult to mine anonymously, thus making it easier to authorities to control those mining.

I expect at this time bandwidth is the major bottle neck.  At least in the US I think we can expect someone wishing to run a full node to have at least 1Mbps of bandwidth.

All transactions will be first broadcast then transmitted again in a block.  There is also overhead for the inventory notify messages.  I will guess that protocol overhead, inventory and addresses take up about as much bandwidth as transactions so needed inbound bandwidth is about 3x what is needed to just transmit the blocks.  Slow connections would naturally limit outbound traffic as nodes would fetch inventory from other hosts that advertise that inventory sooner.  That said it might be worth improving the client to take into account connection speed between nodes.

1Mbps of bandwidth is 75MB per 10 minutes.  I would expect someone would want bandwidth for other things so lets assume 30MB available.  This means someone with 1Mbps of bandwidth should be able to handle up to about 10MB blocks.

Given this I wouldn't expect raising the limit to 10MB would have a significant centralizing effect but significantly higher would.  This doesn't account for tor.

Bitcoin does have the potential to grow significantly faster than network and computer speed increases so transaction growth to a point where block size would become prohibitive is a real future possibility.  I expect we have a little time before this becomes an a significant issue but its clearly best to have a solution prepared before its absolutely necessary.

Could we get decent statistics on the bandwidth of internet connections through the world and basically set the block size to ensure something like 95% of the fixed internet connections would be able to run a full node?  Lots of fudge factors in this calculation but its still less arbitrary than 1MB.

As soon as the block limit is hit it will raise transaction fees and there will be a significant need to justify the limit.  The more objective and reasonable the way that limit is set the better.

I2P is better suited to high bandwidth hidden services than Tor, and a I2P transport protocol is already under development.

Also mining anonymously is only essential to the survival of the currency if every government in the world simultaneously banned Bitcoin. As long as this is not the case it's possible for mining as an industry (not necessarily the individual miners) to route around oppressive legal environments.