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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

Have you actually looked at these issues in any detail because I'm fairly certain there are solutions to most of the objections you are raising.

You don't need to store the whole block chain there are methods to prune it so to speak so that it takes up significantly less space. The Bitcoin client Multibit already does this.

As the transaction volume of the Bitcoin network picks up they can increase the block size so more transactions can be included per block. More transactions means more fees per block.

The right combination of transaction volume, block size, and Bitcoin value could certainly make mining for only transaction fees profitable.

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Increasing the maximum block size would cause a hard blockchain fork. That sort of thing has been done before on a couple of occasions but it's by no means a small deal.

You make them sound casual, bitcoin has has really only had one hard forking change to enable pay-to-script transactions.

> bitcoin has has really only had one hard forking change to enable pay-to-script transactions.

... which wasn't a hard fork. The only hard fork so far was the move from BDB to LevelDB for chain state data.

Actually, if I recall correctly the only hardfork so far was accidental. It's far from clear that a deliberate hardfork would ever get community support, particularly given that some of the core developers are strongly opposed to increasing the block size and think that everyone should move to online wallet services and off-chain transactions for small payments instead.

There have been two. The incident you're thinking of was accidental at first, then done deliberately with notice two months later: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/05/13/bitcoin-blockchain-h...

When I wrote my comment I was also thinking of https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827.0 from 2010, but on a cursory glance it looks like that was resolved with a soft fork, which is possible because the rules were made more restrictive rather than more permissive.

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