Author: Leandro Coutinho 2017-04-01 16:15:32
Published on: 2017-04-01T16:15:32+00:00
The article discusses the cost of maintaining a bank check account compared to running a full node, estimating the former to be around $120 per year in the US. It also suggests that a 4TB hard drive costs approximately $115 and has a warranty of three years. The co-authors of a study on Bitcoin P2P network argue that the 4MB size suggested in the paper should not be used without compensation for two important changes to the network. Recent measurements show that network speeds have improved tremendously, with the average bandwidth of a reachable Bitcoin node increasing by approximately 70% from February 2016 to February 2017. They recommend shortcuts like witness pruning and UTXO commitment to make full node initialization more feasible. The emergence of high-speed block relay networks and block compression further change the picture dramatically. However, these technologies assume big miners being benevolent. While some participants believe that raising the block size limit is possible, others consider it risky and suggest waiting until SegWit activates before committing to any additional increases. Wang Chun proposes a hard fork approach to remove the 1MB limit at the next block halving in spring 2020, only limiting the block size to 32MiB, which is the maximum size the current p2p protocol allows. This patch must be in the immediate next release of Bitcoin Core. With this patch, Bitcoin works just as before, no fork will ever occur, until spring 2020, giving third-party services, libraries, wallets and exchanges enough time to prepare for it over the next three years.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:48:12.364470+00:00