Here’s the raw transcript of a conversation I had yesterday evening with Gavin Andresen about his desire to increase the maximum Bitcoin block size.

The fundamental pain point here, is that Gavin insists on everyone being able to get in, instead of allowing a sane transaction fee market to emerge, by letting the blocks actually fill-up.

Leaving aside the USG-implications of even mentioning “actual economists”, we can focus on his disagreement with the fact that non-full blocks basically imply the presence of as much crap as freeloaders will be able to get away with. This tendency being worsened by headers-first broadcast of mined blocks negating the risk of getting mined blocks orphaned due to being full of a ton of worthless transactions, and therefore propagating slowly on the network.

Gavin answers this objection, kind of, with “It is possible miners will form cartels to forgo short-term [small fees] for [higher fees in the long run]”, in other words, centralization.

So here we go!