Author: Jorge Timón 2015-08-04 10:35:06
Published on: 2015-08-04T10:35:06+00:00
Mike Hearn and Venzen engaged in a discussion regarding how more users or nodes can bring more miners, or, more importantly, improve mining decentralization. Venzen claimed that it is a non-sequitur while Mike Hearn stated that when Bitcoin was new, it had almost no users and miners, but now there are millions of users and factories producing ASICs just for Bitcoin. He cited the correlation between the two but Venzen argued that the correlation does not imply causation.Mike Hearn further explained that Gavin ran simulations and chose 20MB as a reasonable block size to target because 170GB per month comfortably fits into the typical 250-300GB per month data cap. Venzen questioned the basis of choosing 20MB and demanded some criterion that could tell if a given size would be "too centralized" but another one isn't. When Mike Hearn suggested choosing between two changes to improve mining decentralisation, lowering block size or finishing, documenting, and making the UX really slick for a getblocktemplate based decentralised mining pool, Venzen picked the latter as he believed it would be a lot more effective. Mike Hearn agreed to this suggestion, hoping that after centralization improves, the consensus limit can be increased.Venzen argued that Mike Hearn's position of not caring much whether they have a consensus limit or not and understanding that the consensus block size maximum rule is a tool for limiting mining centralization at the same time is by not caring about mining centralization at all. He asked if Mike Hearn's position is that he doesn't care about having a limit but doesn't want to limit transaction volume. They also discussed how hitting the limit would make miners start caring about fees and if both things happen, non-urgent transaction fees will likely rise, but Mike Hearn believes it would be a catastrophe for adoption.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T04:36:37.051797+00:00