Gavin Andresen - 2013-04-06 18:49:31

So the longer I think about the block size issue, the more I'm reminded of this Hayek quote:

Quote
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

We can speculate all we want about what is going to happen in the future, but we don't really know.

So, what should we do if we don't know? My default answer is "do the simplest thing that could possibly work, but make sure there is a Plan B just in case it doesn't work."

In the case of the block size debate, what is the simplest thing that just might possibly work?

That's easy!  Eliminate the block size limit as a network rule entirely, and trust that miners and merchants and users will reject blocks that are "obviously too big." Where what is "obviously too big" will change over time as technology changes.

What is Plan B if just trusting miners/merchants/users to do the right thing doesn't work?

Big-picture it is easy:  Schedule a soft-fork that imposes some network-rule-upper-limit, with whatever formula seems right to correct whatever problem crops up.
Small-picture: hard to see what the "right" formula would be, but I think it will be much easier to define after we run into some actual practical problem rather than guessing where problems might crop up.