Author: jl2012 at xbt.hk 2015-08-02 07:16:54
Published on: 2015-08-02T07:16:54+00:00
In this conversation between Pieter Wuille and jl2012 via bitcoin-dev, they discuss the proposed block size increase for Bitcoin. The starting date is suggested to be 30 days after 75% miner support, but not before January 12, 2016. This is to ensure everyone has enough time to follow. The block size will increase gradually from 1,414,213 bytes at the starting date and multiply by 1.414213 every 2^23 seconds (97 days) until exactly 8MB is reached on May 11, 2017. Wuille believes a faster ramp-up in the beginning is not advisable as there is no indisputable evidence that we can currently deal with significantly larger blocks. He also thinks that his equipment can "handle" 20 MB blocks too, but with a huge impact on network propagation speed, and even more people choosing to outsource their full nodes. He suggests that if Bitcoin had 8MB blocks from the start, some more people would have decided to run their high-transaction-rate use cases on-chain, and there would be more complaints about low full node counts; he then questions whether people would still be complaining about the measly 25 transactions per second that Bitcoin could handle on-chain, and demanding a faster ramp-up to a more "reasonable" 64 MB block size.The block reward is miners' major income source, and no rational miner would create mega blocks unless the fee could cover the extra orphaning risk. Blocks were not constantly full until recent months, and many miners are still keeping the 750kB soft limit. This strongly suggests that we won't have 4MB blocks now even Satoshi set an 8MB limit. SPV mining existed long before the 1MB block became full, and it is unlikely that it can be stopped by artificially suppressing the block size. Miners should just do it properly, for example, stop mining until the grandparent block is verified, which would make sure an invalid fork won't grow beyond two blocks.Wuille suggests that if we could have a longer initial ramp-up period, we may adopt a slower long term parameter. He believes we should at least restore the original 32MB limit in a reasonable time frame, say 6-8 years, instead of 20 years in jl2012's proposal. If Bitcoin is to become a global settlement network, 32MB would be the very minimum, as that is only 75% of current SWIFT traffic. Global bandwidth is expected to grow by 37%/year until 2021, so 27.67% should be safe at least for the coming 10 years.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T17:56:27.508741+00:00