Potential dangers of BIP100

Just brainstorming a bit here. Personally, I'm in favour of BIP100 over no increase ever, but BIP101 seems like a much safer and predictable solution.

A few points:

• The fact that it allows the max block size to actually decrease. If we are going to assume we will keep on growing and growing, in what situation would it make sense to forcibly reduce capacity instead of raising it (especially when miners can already set their own soft limits to whatever makes the most sense)? Also people go on about unintended consequences of the limit being increased.. but what about unintended consequences of it being decreased? That seems like even worse uncharted territory to me IMO
• The 32MB "historical limit". With BIP101, once the 32MB is hit (which would be around the year 2020.. and btw BIP100 could potentially reach this limit in just one years worth of miner voting, instead of 4), there is a very clear incentive saying "hey, we should fix this 32MB limit protocol quirk so that we can keep growing". With BIP100 however, it is more like "welp, we hit the absolute limit and fixing it means re-sparking the old block size debate yet again, might as well just stop here".
• Miners voting every 3 months.. or indeed miners voting in general. Not only is this pretty much totally untested, but what incentive do miners have to actively re-think what they feel the optimum block size should be and vote for it? I would imagine that most miners will be lazy (which was sort of proved when during the stress tests it was obvious most miners were using default soft limit settings), and the ones that do care are just going to endlessly argue over what size is best. It would be a constant struggle between those that want to grow the system and collect more fees (more volume), and those that believe for vague reasons that the more artificially restricted block space is, the higher fees everyone will want to pay. Meanwhile transaction fees are still totally negligible compared to block reward for a good 10 more years (don't forget we are only just approaching year 8).
• With BIP101, we have a predictable rate of growth, much like how block rewards are scheduled. I could tell you right now that roughly in the year 2024 the block reward will be 3.125 BTC per block, and (with BIP101) the block size limit would be 128MB, allowing for roughly 640 transactions per second assuming average 350 bytes per tx. With BIP100 though, if you asked me how many tp/s the network could support 3 months from now, I would have no clue. This makes planning difficult.
• And then there is this: http://bit.ly/1UdGlpz

Would be interesting to see what /u/jgarzik thoughts are.

Also important to note that BIP100 is just a proposal and has no implementation so far. All of these miners which have "adopted" it haven't actually done anything yet.

edit this appears to have been auto removed, guess I'm blacklisted from this sub lol

edit2 or maybe not

Submitted August 27, 2015 at 03:02AM by cryptonaut420 http://bit.ly/1K44LCw