Author: Elliot Olds 2015-08-11 05:48:17
Published on: 2015-08-11T05:48:17+00:00
In an email conversation between Jorge Timón and Mike Hearn, they discussed the issue of Bitcoin's block size limit, fees, and security. Mike emphasized that while minimum mining fees rising above zero is not a bad thing, it gets bad when fees become high. He also argued that there should be some rough plan in place for sudden spikes in Bitcoin tx demand, even if it's unlikely to happen, because it could warrant discussing what would be done in that case.Jorge asked if the developers should have some rough plan that they discuss ahead of time about what to do in the situation of high fees. He suggested that it would prevent many people from supporting an urgent hard fork if they knew how the core devs would handle that situation. Mike also talked about the need for a fee market eventually, but he was concerned about insisting on it now because usage is small and the block size is limited. If demand increases just a little bit, fees could skyrocket, putting decentralized money out of reach of many other people.He thinks it's better to not set up roadblocks in front of growth that will make things very painful if that growth happens more suddenly than expected. Finally, Mike argued that two years before Bitcoin will need to rely heavily on txn fees for security, he'd be in favor of adjusting block size so that it resulted in enough total fees/security.In a discussion about transaction fees, it was noted that those who pay no fees never have their transactions confirmed. However, the argument being made was not against minimum fees rising above zero, such as to 1 satoshi/tx, which could potentially have some advantages and is not something to be feared to the point of rushing hardforks to avoid it.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T04:32:37.017082+00:00