What is the cost? I would assume it is consolidation of mining power since larger block size makes it even less likely for smaller players to be able to verify new blocks in real time.
The cost is, with 8MB blocks, 95% of nodes that validate consensus will be excluded (unable to keep up or become too costly to run) within 6 months - as per BitFury's (heavily invested Bitcoin mining company) research on bigger blocks: http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-siz...
Without full nodes validating consensus, miners can (will) force protocol changes (eg. change 21,000,000 coin limit) on users, effectively changing the decentralized leaderless attributes to a centralized dictatorial less-efficient PayPal. At this moment, bigger blocks mean a less-free (as in speech) bitcoin.
The cost is that larger blocks have difficulty crossing the great firewall of china and mining is already centralized there.
I have seen this myself with a production blockchain and blocks that were less than 1mb. Increasing the size increases this effect and gives Chinese miners and artificial advantage.
Plus there's no congestion on the network right now. There's not a scaling problem. It was spam.
Further, segwit increases block size and efficiency so there's no reason to not activate it.
This whole issue isn't about scale, core is still ahead of the curve on what's needed to scale, it's about control, and disabling ASICBOOST and keeping transaction fees high.
'The great firewall of china' isn't someone manually inspecting every byte that enters and leaves china, it can manage more than a 1mb transaction just fine. And, even if the delays were more than minuscule, how does it favour one side over the other? Both sides have the same delay.
Plus there's no congestion on the network right now. There's not a scaling problem. It was spam.
Woohoo! No need for anyone to do anything then. Remind me again why everyone is trying to scale bitcoin?
You don't even seem to understand what we are talking about (not 1mb transactions) and you're flat out wrong. I have direct experience with a p2p network that I have built, and the problems getting blocks between nodes on opposite sides of the "Great Firewall of China". Really any engineer with an understanding of that system and P2P networks should understand why.
Everyone is trying to scale bitcoin because bitcoin is growing dramatically... that doesn't mean that the "full blocks" and "high fees" we saw recently weren't due to spam.
> The cost is that larger blocks have difficulty crossing the great firewall of china and mining is already centralized there.
Ironically, this has actually become a real Byzantine Generals problem. Guess Bitcoin can't actually solve that problem in the real world.
From what I understand, China isn't too keen on the whole endeavor since it circumvents their (stringent) capital controls. What happens if they turn the baleful eye of their deep packet inspection onto the Bitcoin network? (serious question)
(Background for those who don't know: encryption/etc don't work against the Great Firewall, it knows what a given type of connection "looks like" in terms of packets/activity, so it can identify (eg) a VPN session even if it's "wrapped" or "tunneled" across some other protocol. They use a massive amount of machine learning hardware to profile connections in realtime to pick out "suspicious" activity and those connections will be dropped after a few moments. It's not impossible to run arbitrary connections through the firewall but it's very difficult and getting harder all the time.)
