Author: Rick Wesson 2011-08-24 17:07:33
Published on: 2011-08-24T17:07:33+00:00
In an email exchange between Gregory Maxwell and Luke-Jr on August 24, 2011, several suggestions were made for improving the Bitcoin protocol. Luke-Jr proposed replacing hard limits with something that can dynamically adapt with time and suggested adjusting difficulty every block without limits based on a sliding window to solve issues when hashrate drops overnight. However, Maxwell argued that a rolling window would allow much more skew. Luke-Jr also suggested replacing the "Satoshi" 64-bit integers with variable-size fractions, but Maxwell pointed out that it could create bugs and suffer factor inflation. Furthermore, Luke-Jr proposed removing the 100 confirmation requirement for spending generated coins, but Maxwell argued against making Bitcoin less trustworthy and stated that the 100 block maturity on generated coins is good. Maxwell acknowledged that it is obnoxious that generation payouts cannot be padded without creating more transactions, but he did not see a solution for that. Overall, the email exchange highlights various ideas and concerns regarding improvements to the Bitcoin protocol.
Updated on: 2023-05-26T20:31:25.777638+00:00