[martinko]

It does just double it. The problem with increasing it more is propagation speeds around the planet (this needs to be as fast as possible or another miner may get the block reward), especially if the miner is sitting in china.

[kobayashi]

So is increasing the blocksize beyond 2MB expected to favour Chinese minors more so than average users? And if that's the case, would you mind explaining how so, exactly?

[martinko]

The dynamic is not one in which when miners win, users lose. The issue is that users want more transactions per second and therefore want bigger blocks to be created, however, when miners create larger blocks, they have a hard(er) time propagating them to the entire network and thereby run the risk of their block being orphaned (someone else's block will be accepted first, and the miner's block and work done on that block will be wasted).

[kobayashi]

Oh I see, which is why Chinese miners would be especially hesitant about moving to larger block sizes, because the GFoC significantly limits speeds.

[simoncion]

I'm fairly certain that the problem is that users with catastrophically slow or spotty internet connections are the ones that stand to lose in that situation, and that > 50% of Bitcoin's miners are in China, which partially explains the rabid past support for a refusal to increase the max blocksize.