Author: Chris Pacia 2015-08-28 23:42:57
Published on: 2015-08-28T23:42:57+00:00
The email conversation from August 28, 2015 on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list discusses a proposal to increase block size. The proposal addresses the problems of miners selling their block-size votes and trying to predict future market needs versus technological capacities. It starts with a 1-MB limit and throttles changes to ±10% every 2016 blocks. However, it fails to answer an important question about the mechanism for activation of the new consensus rule. When discussing the proposal with Matt Whitlock earlier, Chris Pacia concluded that the block size would never increase under this proposal due to a collective action problem. If a miner votes for an increase and nobody else does, the block size will not increase, but they will still have to pay the difficulty penalty. It may be in everyone's collective interest to raise the block size, but not their individual interest. Gavin asks 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 understanding of the proposal, it would cost 0.11111 BTC or $2.50 at today's exchange rate, which he deems excessive. The email conversation includes links to the proposal on GitHub and the Bitcoin-dev mailing list.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:53:31.854863+00:00