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Re:Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st by jancsika on Thursday July 13, 2017 @06:52AM (#14760222)
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.

But isn't mining power already consolidated?

Re:Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st by grubles on Thursday July 13, 2017 @01:20PM (#14763156)
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.