>>The first was discussing mining. There's no evidence to suggest it's discussing mining. It's directly in response to a criticism of the Bitcoin design, where

>>The first was discussing mining. There's no evidence to suggest it's discussing mining. It's directly in response to a criticism of the Bitcoin design, where a correspondent argues that everyone validating everything to ensure the transactions they receive are valid will get too costly in computing resources. This is the email that the quoted statement was responding to: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014815.html http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November... >To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which, naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof. So it's unambiguously about validation. Why would you claim otherwise? And the last known statements Satoshi made on it were in emails to Mike Hearn, like this one, from December 29 2010: >>A higher limit can be phased in once we have actual use closer to the limit and make sure it's working OK. >>Eventually when we have client-only implementations, the block chain size won't matter much. Until then, while all users still have to download the entire block chain to start, it's nice if we can keep it down to a reasonable size. >>With very high transaction volume, network nodes would consolidate and there would be more pooled mining and GPU farms, and users would run client-only. With dev work on optimising and parallelising, it can keep scaling up. >>Whatever the current capacity of the software is, it automatically grows at the rate of Moore's Law, about 60% per year. That is much more clearly his preference/vision than the brief reference to the community turning tyrannical about block sizes, and it was more recent.