The important point of this is recognizing there is a set of engineering tradeoffs here.
Too big and everyone can transact but the transactions are worthless because no one can validate— basically that gives us what we have with the dollar.
Too small and everyone can validate but the validation is worthless because no one can transact— this is what you have when you try to use real physical gold online or similar.
The definition of too big / too small is a subtle trade-off that depends on a lot of things like the current capability of technology. Retep added to my thinking on this by pointing out that anonymization technology lags the already slow bandwidth scaling we see in the broader thinking, and the ability to potentially anonymize all Bitcoin activity is protective against certain failure scenarios.
My general preference is to error towards being more decentralized. There are three reasons for this:
(1) We can build a multitude of systems of different kinds— decentralized and centralized ones— on top of a strongly decenteralized system but we can't really build something more decentralized on top of something which is less decentralized. The core of Bitcoin sets the maximum amount of decentralization possible in our ecosystem.
(2) Decentralization is what makes what we're doing unique and valuable compared to the alternatives. If decentralization is not very important to you... you'd likely already be much happier with the USD and paypal.
(3) Regardless of the block size we need to have robust alternatives for transacting in BTC in order to improve privacy, instant confirmation, lower costs for low value transactions, permit very tiny femtopayments, and to (optionally!) better support reversible transactions. ... and once we do the global blockchain throughput rate is less of an issue: Instead of a limit of how many transactions can be done it becomes a factor that controls how costly the alternatives are allowed to be at worst, and a factor in how often people need to depend on external (usually less secure) systems.
...and also because I think it's easier to fix if you've gone too small and need to increase it, vs gone too large and shut out the general public from the validation process and handed it over to large entities.
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I think you're mistaking the kind of anonymity being talked about here. Say some random authority wants to force miners to only mine transactions that the authority approves of and not mine any that match some kind of blacklist, and to not extend any chains that contain violations of these rules. If successful this would substantially undermine the purpose and goals of Bitcoin.
If it is easy to mine with relatively high anonymity— if you can validate on a single high performance server with a commodity consumer grade broadband connection and announce over tor or some other anonymity network— it would be difficult to impose such a criteria: too many miners would disappear into the mists if you tried, and so there would be no reason to try. If, instead, running a validating node (much less a miner) requires a rack of expensive equipment and a multi-gigabit network connection that is far less clearly the case.
Submitted February 01, 2016 at 01:52PM by Anonobread- http://bit.ly/1WWrzX4
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