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Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 18:11:16 +0200
Message-ID: <CABm2gDrF_dGM9KrThSoAr4FP1KtbYTnKx433X1PmKRUXfXRiTQ@mail.gmail.com>
From: =?UTF-8?B?Sm9yZ2UgVGltw7Nu?= <jtimon@jtimon.cc>
To: Tier Nolan <tier.nolan@gmail.com>
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Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Draft BIP : fixed-schedule block size increase
Precedence: list

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Tier Nolan <tier.nolan@gmail.com> wrote:
> - Miner vote to decide soft limit (lowest size ignoring bottom 20% but 1MB
> minimum)

I don't think is all that interesting to make miners vote on lower
limit. Say the community wants to reduce the size to limit mining
centralization, it's not unthinkable that the hashrate majority (which
may have to face more competition or harvest less transactions after
the change) may oppose to that and then the community is forced to
deploy an anti-miner's hardfork (maybe even asic-reset hardfork?)
instead of a softfork.
Yes, uncontroversial sofforks are easier and less risky to deploy than
uncontroversial hardforks, but anti-miner hardforks are not.
Not only I don't think it's a good idea for miners to vote on the
block size (which is there to control them), I don't even buy the
assumption that "we can always just softfork a smallwer size later".
If you give something to miners they may not want to give it back later.
We could hardfork to 42 M supply and then "just softfork back to 21 M", right?
Or what's the same, we could "just softfork supply to 15 M". Such a
change would be clearly controversial among miners, so it wouldn't be
an uncontroversial softfork anymore. Some of these cases are discussed
in BIP99.