Author: Paul Sztorc 2015-08-21 23:17:51
Published on: 2015-08-21T23:17:51+00:00
The email exchange begins with a discussion on the principle behind Bitcoin's blocksize limit. One person believes that the optimum blocksize is related to popularity/use of Bitcoin, while others argue that technical limitations such as bandwidth should determine it. The suggestion is made to measure "popularity" directly by using transaction volume or fees paid to set the blocksize. A proposal for a democratic way to adjust the block size is then presented in the form of a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) authored by Btc Drak. The motivation behind the proposal is that Bitcoin needs to be able to respond quickly to raising the blocksize limit if popularity were to suddenly increase due to mass adoption. The proposal introduces a cost to increase the block size, ensuring that the mining community will only collude to increase it when there is clear necessity and reduce it when unnecessary. The specification includes miners voting for the block size increase by signaling the proposed percentage increase of the "base block size limit" in the coinbase field, and recalculating the maximum allowed block size every 2016 blocks based on the average of all votes in the last 2016 blocks. The maximum change up or down each retargeting period is limited to 10% of the base block size limit, and the maximum block size may not increase above 8MB. The proposal is based on ideas and concepts derived from the writings of Meni Rosenfeld and Gregory Maxwell.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:54:40.782670+00:00