Author: Matt Whitlock 2015-08-28 23:42:03
Published on: 2015-08-28T23:42:03+00:00
In August 2015, a proposal was put forth on the bitcoin-dev mailing list regarding block size increases. The proposal suggested paying a difficulty penalty to produce larger-than-limit blocks immediately for a chance at later mining larger blocks. However, concerns were raised that this would result in a collective action problem where miners would not vote for an increase and still have to pay the penalty. It was noted that it may be in everyone's collective interest to raise the block size but not their individual interest. Additionally, there were questions about the cost of including extra transactions and the mechanism for activation of the new consensus rule. Despite these concerns, the proposal was considered by some as the best yet since it addressed several issues with previous proposals. It aimed to avoid incentivizing miners to vote to lower the block-size limit and imposed a tangible cost on miners who vote to raise it. The proposal also throttled changes to ±10% every 2016 blocks and avoided a large step discontinuity in the block-size limit by starting with a 1-MB limit.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:53:20.438584+00:00