Author: Jorge Timón 2015-08-14 23:12:08
Published on: 2015-08-14T23:12:08+00:00
Jorge Timón and Venzen Khaosan discussed the potential risks associated with a big list of valid unconfirmed transactions in Bitcoin, which could result in a backlog of transactions. The consequences of this include the fear that something bad is going to happen, leading to "pre-traumatic stress" for users. Bitcoin-based businesses are likely to lose money, customers, and potentially fail, while people may flee Bitcoin for another cryptocurrency with lower fees, resulting in less usage than the network could have had with a bigger size. This could lead to more regulation pressure and not enough fees when subsidy is lower. The problem is independent of a concrete block size and needs to be solved anyway, often specific to Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin Core's mempool is unbounded in size, which can make the program crash by using too much memory. Additionally, there is no good way to increase the fee of a transaction taking too long to be mined without the "double spending" transaction with the higher fee being blocked by most nodes. This is due to Bitcoin Core's default policy for conflicting spends replacements (aka "first seen" replacement policy).
Updated on: 2023-06-10T19:15:28.221484+00:00