gavinandresen: I’ve gotta go. Pierre_Rochard, nice chatting with you.

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: I think if you went to a VC with a business plan of “We’re going to raise prices until we start losing customers” the VC would tell you that is a huge mistake if you’re a high-growth thing-a-ma-bob

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: … because driving up real Bitcoin prices is why I think we should do everything possible to encourage widespread adoption

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: fee revenue measured in real prices, yes?

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: can you define “much too high limit” ?

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: ok. I’d like to brainstorm more about how you would set the maximum block size— I don’t want the developers setting it every two months, but I dont’ see a way to make fee revenue per block drive it (because the real-world bitcoin exchange rate is so variable)

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: what do you think of my argument that hash rate and fees are apples and oranges? That people will substitute away from fee-paying transactions to other solutions that use the block chain, which means trying to maximize fees means no guarantee that there will be enough hash rate to secure the chain?

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: you’re probably right. Are you a miner yourself?

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: I believe the goal should be to maximize the value of Bitcoin for everybody

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: You started with a premise that I reject, by the way: I do not believe that a goal should be to maximize miner revenue

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: if wallets could deal with that I’d be more open to running the experiment, although I still think it is a terrible idea to shut out ANY reasonable use cases at this early stage of Bitocn’s life

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: unfortunately, the experience for the marginal transactor is terrible: their transactions just never, ever confirm. Their coins get tied up…

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: So, lets say we do see fees rise. How far do we let them rise? Who decides?

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: But you just said you want to let fees go up high enough so, at the margin, some people ARE turned away.

gavinandresen: Anybody be offended if I ignore ben_vulpes? distracting me….

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: okey dokey. What if you’re wrong?

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: But we’d get probably at least six months, maybe a year or two of substitution because it takes time to roll out a hard forking change

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: Seems to me it is better to do everything we can to encourage widespread adoption right now.

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: but why would we want to hit the “then substitutes start happening” when we’re in Bitcoin’s infancy?

gavinandresen: ben_vulpes: “patches welcome” Alex Morcos has a patch pending with better fee estimation code.

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: … I misstated: that will influence the maximum possible block size....

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: what information will we get that will influence how large to make blocks?

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: the 0.10 release’s wallet code includes floating fees, so over the next couple months we should get a much better idea of what is happening fee-wise.

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: I think we’re there: http://hashingit.com/analysis/39-the-myth-of-the-megabyte-bitcoin-block

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: ok, exactly what would you propose?

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: if Satoshi hadn’t slapped on a 1MB blocksize limit, would you be lobbying for a hardfork now to impose one? ☟︎

gavinandresen: Pierre_Rochard: I think you’re confusing the limit miners self-impose with the hard-coded upper limit

gavinandresen: ben_vulpes: really? Have read https://gist.github.com/sipa/5d12c343746dad376c80 ???

gavinandresen: ben_vulpes: yes; a soft fork makes the protocol more strict. You have to hard fork to make it more lenient.