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Comment by mithrilskeleton | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of restricting the block size was to ensure space in the blockchain was scarce to drive the price of fees up, better securing the network. Well, that and keeping the blockchain total size small enough to be processed on an regular user's PC for decentralization sake. While a loss of some decentralization is non-ideal, increasing the block size dynamically, similarly to how difficulty is handled, would be a reasonable compromise to ensure the security of the network long term.

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Monero does dynamic block size. It works fine. There is a penalty for large swings in size and that controls the fee which allows the fee to be appropriate during swells and luls in volume.

Something I would like to see from the cryptocurrency space is some way for the block size to fluctuate with daily and weekly transaction volume. For example, you would expect that the transaction volume would be greater when it is daytime on the east coast, so the blocksize should adapt to those temporal changes as well.

If there is a certain latentcy/bandwidth/storage/decentralization tradeoff with block sizes, then we ought to design cryptocurrencies to make the most of this tradeoff with respect to predictable low/high demand.

Ethereum changes the cost to use the network based on recent block sizes, and allows the block size to go up during high demand. So it's cheaper to use the network when blocks are less full, and more expensive if blocks are mostly full. I'm behind on the current parameters, but they're essentially doing what you ask for:

https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1559

>some way for the block size to fluctuate with daily and weekly transaction volume.

What you describe is what is done with countless blockchains already, including the example I gave. This is a solved problem.

That wasn't the reason to restrict block size. There is no way to scale the number of transactions on the main layer to anywhere near the level required to cover daily transactions. The bitcoin main layer was always destined to be for settlements between financial institutions anyway. Making any accommodations for use cases that are fundamentally unsustainable never made sense. Buying coffee was always going to have to be on a second or third layer, so restricting the block size introduces an incentive to develop those layers that are needed anyway.

Bitcoin: lets make it so a medium grade computer and internet connection by 2008’s midrange standards works. Forever.

Solana: let’s make it so that enthusiast grade computers and internet connectivity by 2024’s high range standard works. Sometimes. But keep pushing.

Is solana even decentralized? I thought it was like ripple. I haven't been paying too much attention though.

There are unaffiliated nodes, you can run your own validator and stake independently.

This decentralizes transaction processing and arbitrary code execution.

Client upgrades and hard forks are largely centralized. This isn’t one and the same with the transaction processing nodes compared to bitcoin.

Saying centralized without context is reductive and doesn’t tell much though. I would like all aspects less centralized though.

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