1. Transaction confirmation times for transactions with



2. Average transaction fee paid will rise

3. People or applications unwilling or unable to pay the



4. People and businesses will shelve plans to use



Failure to plan now for a hard fork increase 6(?) months in the futureproduces that lumpy, unpredictable market behavior.The market has baked in the years-long behavior of low fees. From themarket PoV, inaction does lead to precisely that, a sudden change overthe span of a few months.At a higher level, people look at bitcoin and see people delaying,waiting, dawdling until the barn is actually on fire before takingaction to put out the fire.They see a system that is not responsive to higher level externalitiesof people & businesses making plans for the future. Based on currentproposal of change-through-inaction, businesses will simply shelveplans to use bitcoin and not bother putting those new users on thenetwork.If you wait until the need to increase block size is acute, it isalready too late. (1) Businesses have permanently shelved plans touse bitcoin and (2) change at that point produces _larger_ disruptionto the fee market.Hard forks require planning many months in advance. Gavin's timing issound, even though the Gavin/Hearn Bitcoin-XT antics were sub-optimal.On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 11:12 AM, Pieter WuilleI am not saying that economic change is what we want. Only that itis inevitable, independent of whether larger blocks happen or not.I am saying that acting because of fear of economic change is abad reason. The reason for increase should be because of thehigher utility. We need it at some point, but there should be no rush.I do understand that we want to avoid a *sudden* change ineconomic policy, but I'm generally not too worried. Either feesincrease and they get paid, and we're good. But more likely isthat some uses just move off-chain because the block chain doesnot offer what they need. That's sad, but it is inevitable at anysize: some uses fit, some don't.--PieterIt is not "fear" of fee pressure.1) Blocks are mostly not-full on average.2) Absent long blocks and stress tests, there is little feepressure above the anti-spam relay fee metric, because of #1.3) As such, inducing fee pressure is a delta, a change fromyears-long bitcoin economic policy. Each time we approach thesoft limit, Bitcoin Core increases the soft limit to prevent"full" blocks. Mike Hearn et. al. lobbies miners to upgrade.(note - this is not an endorsement of these actions - it is aneutral observation)4) Inaction leads to consistent fee pressure as the monthstick on and system volume grows; thus, inaction leads toeconomic policy change.5) Economic policy change leads to market and softwaredisruption. The market and software - notably wallets - isnot prepared for this.6) If you want to change economic policy, that's fine. But behonest and admit you are arguing for a change, a delta fromcurrent market expectations and behavior.7) It is critical to first deal with what _is_, not what youwish the world to be. You want a fee market to develop.There is nothing wrong with that desire. It remains a deltafrom where we are today, and that is critically relevant in a$3b+ market.On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 7:09 AM, Pieter WuilleHello all,here I'm going to try to address a part of the block sizethe reason why people seem to want it.People say that larger blocks are necessary. In the longterm, I agree - in the sense that systems that do notevolve tend to be replaced by other systems. Thisevolution can come in terms of layers on top of Bitcoin'sblockchain, in terms of the technology underlying variousaspects of the blockchain itself, and also in the scalethat this technology supports.I do, however, fundamentally disagree that a fear for achange in economics should be considered to necessitatelarger blocks. If it is, and there is consensus that weshould adapt to it, then there is effectively no limitgoing forward. This is similar to how Congress voting toincrease the copyright term retroactively from time totime is really no different from having an infinitecopyright term in the first place. This scares me.Here is how Gavin summarizes the future without increasinga given fee will rise; very-low-fee transactions will failto get confirmed at all.rising fees will stop submitting transactionsBitcoin, stunting growth and adoptionIs it fair to summarize this as "Some use cases won't fitany more, people will decide to no longer use theblockchain for these purposes, and the fees will adapt."?I think that is already happening, and will happen at anyscale. I believe demand for payments in general is nearlyinfinite, and only a small portion of it will eventuallyfit on a block chain (independent of whether its size islimited by consensus rules or economic or technologicalmeans). Furthermore, systems that compete with Bitcoin inthis space already offer orders of magnitude more capacitythan we can reasonably achieve with any blockchaintechnology at this point.I don't know what subset of use cases Bitcoin will caterto in the long term. They have already changed - you seeway less betting transactions these days than a few yearsago for example - and they will keep changing, independentof what effective block sizes we end up with. I don'tthink we should be afraid of this change or try to stop it.If you look at graphs of block sizes over time (forexample, http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=498), it seems to methat there is very little "organic" growth, and a lot ofsudden changes (which could correspond to changingdefaults in miner software, introduction of popularsites/services, changes in the economy). I think these canbe seen as the economy changing to full up the availablespace, and I believe these will keep happening at any sizeeffectively available.None of this is a reason why the size can't increase.However, in my opinion, we should do it because we believeit increases utility and understand the risks; not becausewe're afraid of what might happen if we don't hurry up.And from that point of view, it seems silly to make a hugeincrease at once...--Pieter_______________________________________________bitcoin-dev mailing listhttps://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev_______________________________________________bitcoin-dev mailing listhttps://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev