Author: Elliot Olds 2015-08-11 23:20:21
Published on: 2015-08-11T23:20:21+00:00
In this bitcoin-dev discussion, Gavin Andresen and Pieter Wuille are discussing the reasons for raising the maximum block size limit. Andresen believes that fear of "bad things happening" as the network approaches the 1MB limit is one reason to increase the limit. However, Wuille disagrees, stating that demand is infinite if a fee minimum is not set and that the market will find a way to fill whatever is available. He argues that acting out of fear does not improve the system and that running out of capacity is inevitable at any size. Andresen agrees that increasing the block size can be justified without appealing to fear of unknown effects of a fee market developing. However, he thinks that high fees can have negative consequences. He presents several statements related to low fees and asks Wuille which ones he disagrees with. These include the idea that Bitcoin's security will eventually have to be paid for almost entirely via transaction fees, that many users making on-chain transactions and paying 5 cents/tx is more sustainable than a smaller number of users paying $3/tx, and that it's important for Bitcoin to become widely used to protect the network against regulators. Andresen also argues that there are potentially valuable use cases that can benefit from Bitcoin's decentralization but are nonviable at $3/tx. Allowing fees to stay high and pricing out these use cases would result in a significant loss of utility. He also points out that the Lightning Network will be less appealing at higher fees, as it will require larger anchor txn values to amortize the costs of the Bitcoin tx fees. Finally, he suggests that allowing people to experiment with low fee use cases now is important so that these use cases have time to be discovered, improved, and become popular before Bitcoin's security relies exclusively on fees.The discussion ends with Andresen asking a hypothetical question about whether or not devs would be in favor of a hard fork to 4 MB if it would keep fees at around 5 cents for the next two years, as opposed to remaining at 1 MB and having fees of around $1 for the same period.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:29:37.173478+00:00