Author: Mark Friedenbach 2015-08-07 18:25:39
Published on: 2015-08-07T18:25:39+00:00
The Bitcoin community is divided over the block size limit, and there's a fundamental disagreement between Gavin Andresen and Pieter Wuille on whether or not it should be raised. Andresen believes that raising the maximum block size is necessary because of fear of bad things happening as Bitcoin runs up against the 1MB limit. On the other hand, Wuille thinks that the demand is infinite if you don't set a fee minimum, and it just takes time for the market to find a way to fill whatever is available. He argues that you will run out of capacity at any size and that acting out of fear of that reality does not improve the system. Whatever size blocks are produced, Wuille believes that the result will either be something people consider too small to be competitive or something that is very centralized in practice, and likely both. It's worth noting that everyone working on Bitcoin would prefer everyone in the world being able to use the Bitcoin ledger for whatever purpose if there were no cost. However, like any real-world engineering issue, this is a matter of tradeoffs. It's impossible to scale Bitcoin to the terabyte-sized blocks that would be necessary to service the entire world's financial transactions without sacrificing entirely the protection of policy neutrality achieved through decentralization. As that is Bitcoin's only advantage over traditional consensus systems, one has to wonder what the point of such an endeavor would be. Somewhere, you have to draw the line, and transactions below that level are simply pushed into higher-level or off-chain protocols. Pieter Wuille and Jorge have been pointing out that technical discussion over where that line should be has been missing from this debate. Ryan Butler believes that higher block sizes can support more users and volume while keeping the downsides to a minimum, but Pieter Wuille warns that it's a dangerous precedent to make technical decisions based on a fear of change of economics.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:34:01.851745+00:00