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Great points. It could be argued that adjusting a parameter like block size should be easy and that this not being possible is a design limitation of Bitcoin.

Great points. It could be argued that adjusting a parameter like block size should be easy and that this not being possible is a design limitation of Bitcoin. However if you consider that miners (or more abstractly, mining rigs themselves) are easily repurposed to mine a BTC fork which could potentially include a larger block size from the start. So the conflict is between the beneficial network effects of BTC and the transaction cost imposed by arguably "bad" governance (corrupt governance, if the rumor you mention is true). There are lots of interesting incentives that apply to BTC at scale that are hard to predict when reading the paper. I think we'll see a very messy world of many competing cryptocurrencies and difficult-to-understand layers of overly centralized governance resulting in layers upon layers of perverted incentives. But the silver lining is that the blockchain is a nice way to offer the kind of transparency that could make a system like that actually far better than the kind of messes we end up in with fiat currencies :)

CydeWeys 9y ago
Why should adjusting the block size be "easy"? Who gets to adjust it, and what is the mechanism? How do you prevent bad actors from picking adjustments that benefit them but that hurt the ecosystem over all (i.e. a tragedy of the commons situation)? I don't think you've thought this through enough. I will tell you that, right now, I can just about barely fit the entire blockchain onto my laptop. With a bigger block size, that would no longer be possible. Similarly, the network requirements of transmitting much bigger blocks would hemorrhage users as well. What we need is something like Lightning Network, which is a multiple-level system that doesn't require that all participants download all data from the levels beyond level one. Just naively scaling up level one removes lots of participants from the system and still hits a cap at well below what we'd want Bitcoin to finally be capable of handling.

CydeWeys 9y ago

Why should adjusting the block size be "easy"? Who gets to adjust it, and what is the mechanism? How do you prevent bad actors from picking adjustments that benefit them but that hurt the ecosystem over all (i.e. a tragedy of the commons situation)? I don't think you've thought this through enough. I will tell you that, right now, I can just about barely fit the entire blockchain onto my laptop. With a bigger block size, that would no longer be possible. Similarly, the network requirements of transmitting much bigger blocks would hemorrhage users as well. What we need is something like Lightning Network, which is a multiple-level system that doesn't require that all participants download all data from the levels beyond level one. Just naively scaling up level one removes lots of participants from the system and still hits a cap at well below what we'd want Bitcoin to finally be capable of handling.