Author: Mark Friedenbach 2015-08-28 23:38:21
Published on: 2015-08-28T23:38:21+00:00
On August 28, 2015, a discussion was held on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list regarding the increase in block size. Chris Pacia noted that the block size would never increase under the proposed solution due to a collective action problem. If a miner votes for an increase and no one else does, the block size will not increase yet they will still have to pay the difficulty penalty. It was suggested that it may be in everyone's collective interest to raise the block size, but not their individual interest.Gavin Andresen questioned how much it would cost a miner to include an extra 500-byte transaction if the average block size is 900K and it costs the miner 20BTC in electricity/capital/etc to mine a block. According to his calculations, it would cost approximately 0.11111 BTC or $2.50 at today's exchange rate, which he deemed excessive.Matt Whitlock praised a proposal that addressed the problems of other proposals, such as miners selling their block-size votes or predicting future market needs versus technological capacities. The proposal starts with a 1-MB limit, throttles changes to ±10% every 2016 blocks, and imposes higher difficulty on miners who vote to raise the block-size limit. It avoids incentivizing miners to vote to lower the block-size limit. However, the proposal failed to answer an important question about the mechanism for activation of the new consensus rule.The proposal can be found on GitHub and a pull request has been made for it.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:56:32.040852+00:00