Gavin Andresen - 2015-01-31 03:12:28

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I think we should target somebody with a "pretty good" computer and a "pretty good" home internet connection.

And assume that network bandwidth, CPU and storage will continue to grow at about the rates they've been growing for the last 30 or more years (see the wikipedia pages on Moore's Law and Nielson's Law for pointers to discussions on those).

250gb per month is plenty for a 20MB block size
(20MB every ten minutes times 6 blocks per hour times 24 hours/day times 31 days/month == 90GB; we currently transmit all transaction data twice (haven't optimized that yet), so double that and you're still well under 250gb per month).


I believe it is extremely important to maintain the fundamental properties that Satoshi laid out -- because the system he described is the system that all of us who own bitcoin bought in to.

If the collective decision is to change some of those fundamental properties, then there must be extremely good reasons to do so.

On the block size issue, Satoshi said on Sun, 02 Nov 2008 on the metz-dowd cryptography mailing list (in reply to a question about scalability):
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When I first heard about Bitcoin, it was small enough I could read everything, and I did, including all of those mailing list posts. The promise of a system that could scale up to rival Visa is part of the vision that sold me on Bitcoin.

I feel bad suggesting that we limit the block size at all, or that the target be home computers and internet connections -- but I think there are plausible concerns about centralization risk, and I think starting small and scaling up as technology advances is a reasonable compromise.