A summary list of all concerns related to not rising the block size



Summary:

In an email exchange between Elliot Olds and Jorge Timón in 2015, a discussion was had about the potential consequences of rising Bitcoin fees. Jorge believes that all concerns can be classified into six groups, with the first group being the "potential indirect consequence of rising fees". Elliot suggests rephrasing this as "consequences of high fees" because it is the level of fees that is the main issue. Elliot lists several reasons why high fees are concerning, including reducing the utility of people using the network and making some use cases nonviable, thus depriving people of Bitcoin's decentralized benefits. High fees also discourage experimentation with new Bitcoin use cases, make Bitcoin more vulnerable to regulation, and reduce the amount of time until transaction fees need to pay for a significant portion of Bitcoin's security. Additionally, slowing usage growth makes it less likely that we have a large enough base of transactions by the time we need to fund network security via tx fees. Elliot also mentions that there is a software problem independent of concrete block size that needs to be solved anyway, which is often specific to Bitcoin Core. This includes Bitcoin Core's mempool being unbounded in size and causing the program to crash by using too much memory. There's also no good way to increase the fee of a transaction that is taking too long to be mined without the "double spending" transaction with the higher fee being blocked by most nodes which follow Bitcoin Core's default policy for conflicting spends replacements (aka "first seen" replacement policy).


Updated on: 2023-06-10T19:14:15.901749+00:00