hello cypher,

excuse my ignorance, but can you link me to the news? I cant find anything new from nyse/nasdaq.

I know that they are using colored coins on the bitcoin network to track pre-IPO stock transfers as a pilot program, but i havent heard anything new since.

It looks awesome.
I would like to see one more white label. The introduction of the 1MB limit to limit spam.

Smooth, you've made a good point about spam however how do we weigh up the trade offs between limiting money velocity and spam?

On that note if I look at Peter's graphic the space available for spam was relatively high after the introduction of the limit and orders of magnitude greater back then that with the 8MB jump.

On a gut level I'd go with a limit until we have a 6.25 BTC block reward, until then I see transaction fees as inconsequential the motive is smaller blocks that propagate fast, and later once block subsidies have diminished there is a pressure to include and optimize fees.

Bitcoin can in theory give them very high Txs/sec (and Txs/block) by centralizing the mining onto to higher powered miners.

They may not care when that centralization leads to mandatory KYC tags for all transactions on the block chain due to regulatory capture of hosted mining.

Some other individuals will care about privacy and be pissed off that Bitcoin became another fiat, and they will leave to coin that can remain decentralized and anonymous.

I think you may have slightly misunderstood my point. It isn't that spam itself needs to be limited, it is that the system is vulnerable to a sort of denial of service from having too much data (whether that happens to be spam or "real" data, although obviously spam is less desirable) stuffed into it. Satoshi made a judgement at one time that 1 MB was an appropriate limit based on that vulnerability, considering the state of the technology, storage, propagation, etc.. What is the evidence for that vulnerability being sufficiently smaller now or in the near future that a 8x or 20x or 1000x is appropriate instead?

I'm sorry but I just see a lot of wishful thinking going on. Of course, we all want it to scale, but instead of actually improving how it scales, the proposal today is to simply push back the safety limit and change not much else. (A bit like ripping out the airbags and safety belts from a car to cut weight and make it go faster.)

Another great chart Peter.

One suggestion. Is it worth mentioning IBLT because by the time 16MB blocks are being mined they will likely be taking up just 500KB of bandwidth overhead to propagate. Obviously the real-time unconfirmed transaction overhead does remain. and is large long-term.

Just as during the 1MB debate so many people kept confusing the block size limit as the average block size, so is the case with Gavin's doubling schedule. These big block sizes are disk block sizes, the bandwidth-using blocks will be far smaller.

Full blocks will only need to be sent between nodes on resync and bootstrapping, not a normal state for most nodes. Even then, future Bitsat-type blockchain download services should mean that nodes catching up have a faster option than relying on terrestrial broadband.

Well if he's gonna mention IBLT he might as well mention pruning because that is now. As in available now and probably in the next release. That's almost more exciting to me. I'm looking to add about a dozen more XT nodes to my portfolio once I figure out how to set that set up.

Unfortunately, they are going to remain entrenched until they see a cross over in XT vs Core nodes in Bitnodes. And or a majority of XT version blocks.

The gamble they make is if they wait too long their core dev positions probably come into jeopardy as Gavin will probably want to clean house at that point. Can you blame him?

I mean heck, if the "spam" is paying full TX fees, how can you fault that? How do you even tell it's spam? Either way the miners will be made healthy.

What is funny to me is you haven't considered that if a very popular application of anonymity arises which demands millions of transactions per day, Bitcoin can not fill this market.

That market if it exists will leave Bitcoin behind.

And there is nothing you can say which will change that fact.

Black swans are not easy for people to see.