| point 1 is obviously true To point 2 - the original white paper doesn't even mention "block size limit" because originally Bitcoin did not have a block size limit. "Honest miners" are assumed by the author to always include all profitable transactions (ie. where the fee > marginal cost to include it in a block). The limit was added after an attack in the earliest days of Bitcoin. That attack vector is simple: a miner who mines a block includes bogus transactions to himself in order to inflate the block to gigantic proportions. Other miners, who have to validate its contents, choke on the block. Meanwhile the attacker is free to keep mining, and / or the network stops processing transactions. The original attack, and why it's no longer relevant, is described in this blog: http://gavinandresen.ninja/One-Dollar-Lulz In short, the attack vector which prompted the creation of a block-size-limit consensus rule is no longer a concern, as it has been addressed in two ways: (1) This attack surfaced in the earliest days of Bitcoin, when it cost nothing to mine and miners risked nothing if they mined a block and threw it away by attacking the network. Today, industrial miners risk $10K with every block they would lose if they tried the original attack - which by the way (2) is preventable without even having a consensus rule, for example by running Bitcoin Unlimited, a version of Bitcoin which attempts to re-create "original" Bitcoin by allowing each miner to set his own "anti-attack" limit, instead of requiring the network to agree to share the same limit. It is clear from the various online records that the limit was intended a non-economic anti-attack threshold, to be removed if it ever became an issue. |
A lot of this makes little sense to someone from the "outside" like me, but you are able to explain it in a good way.
Thanks for the help!