The blocksize / Bitcoin XT debate is getting pretty heated (see this thread). In Computer Science, real data and real deployments are the things which matter and no amount of arguing or simulations are a substitute for real deployments.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”

For the blocksize debate, people usually point out that network bandwidth/latency is limited in different parts of the world and larger blocks can mean that only people with high bandwidth connections can participate in the network. We can easily test this out. There is a great resource PlanetLab that is used by thousands of researchers to run real-world experiments. Think of PlanetLab as Amazon AWS for researchers. It has real nodes/hardware deployed all over the world and you can run real experiments on it. Instead of debating “what will happen when someone in India with a 256 Kbps joins XT with 8MB blocks”. You can actually run XT on nodes in India using PlanetLab and just see what happens. I’m happy to put XT developers in touch with the PlanetLab core devs for this experiment.

Real data trumps everything. Period.