Gavin Andresen - 2013-06-03 20:18:20

So you are OK with like 70% of the haspower going to a fork that did not accept your change?

No, absolutely not. The process for a hard fork looks like:

+ Get rough consensus that the change is necessary.
+ Write the code.
+ Get it reviewed and thoroughly tested.
+ Release software that will support it when X% of hashing power agrees

... where X is a super-majority (like 75% or more).  If 70% of hashing power disagrees, then it doesn't happen. Miners will express support by producing block.version=3 blocks (just like they are now producing block.version=2 blocks that MUST include the chain height in the coinbase transaction).

It is possible the X% threshold will never happen if 1MB is plenty big enough. It is possible it will only happen when transaction fees start going up and pressure increases on pools to make their blocks bigger (or maybe merchants tired of paying high fees figure out they'll save money by mining or operating pools themselves, will get X% of hashing power, and will increase the block size).

Again, I spent a lot of time at the conference talking with people about the block size issue, and there is definitely consensus that 1MB just won't be big enough eventually. That has nothing to do with microtransactions, normal growth in "macrotransactions" will bump up against the limit in a year or three.