Author: Jeff Garzik 2015-08-19 14:35:36
Published on: 2015-08-19T14:35:36+00:00
A post on the bitcoin-dev mailing list indicates that nodes are technically capable of handling blocks larger than the current block size limit. However, data shows that even miners who have all the incentives are struggling to download and validate much smaller blocks. Empty blocks have been mined despite a non-trivial elapsed time from the previous block. This is concerning because if miners continue to SPV mine for a whole minute, a malicious miner could mine an invalid block on purpose and let these pools SPV mine on top of them while it mines a valid block free of their competition. This would lead to reorgs and many block orphans for anyone not running a full node, which could be disastrous in the XT world where Mike wants everyone to be running SPV nodes. The impact of this could be more mining centralization, which is already too centralized today. It is unclear why this is happening, and there are several steps of latency involved in the process.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:04:06.255791+00:00