Author: Geir Harald Hansen 2015-08-13 22:01:15
Published on: 2015-08-13T22:01:15+00:00
The context discusses the possible consequences of not increasing the hard limit on block size in Bitcoin. An influx of new users and transactions could cause blocks to constantly be full, leading to a backlog of transactions that grows indefinitely. This could result in people saying "Bitcoin doesn't work" and eventually leading to its demise with only five users left. The hard limit on block size cannot be changed quickly, requiring a fork that takes too long. If the limit had been increased earlier, mining pools could have reacted quickly by upping their own soft limit. The risks of increasing the block size limit include the transaction fee market taking longer to develop. However, not increasing the limit risks the death of Bitcoin. Transaction fees should not be the main topic of discussion, but concerns about rising fees causing the lowest fee transactions to become more unreliable and people migrating to competing systems with lower fees are valid. There are also software problems independent of the concrete block size that need to be solved, such as Bitcoin Core's mempool being unbounded in size and there not being a good way to increase the fee of a slow transaction without creating a conflicting spend replacement.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T19:15:08.789358+00:00