Author: Pieter Wuille 2015-12-16 20:59:41
Published on: 2015-12-16T20:59:41+00:00
The email conversation is a discussion on the proposed Segregated Witness (SW) solution to improve block size and scalability issues with Bitcoin. Jeff Garzik expresses concerns over the two separate, supply-limited resources created by SW that complicates block economics. However, Pieter proposes defining the virtual_block_size as base_size + witness_size * 0.25 to create a single variable to optimize for, which incentivizes miners to maximize fee per virtual_block_size instead of per size.The conversation also delves into the pace of roll-out, where it cannot simply be judged by soft fork speed but must consider updating bitcoin-core (JS) and bitcoinj (Java) layers above and timelines to roll out those updates to apps. Pieter highlights that everyone can upgrade whenever they want and get reduced fees as soon as they do, unlike hard forks, which force every full node to upgrade at once.Pieter disagrees with Jeff's proposal that a simple hard fork such as BIP 102 is automatically compatible with the vast range of today's ecosystem software and requires merchants to upgrade almost immediately. He believes that SW can be adopted much more easily as it doesn't require the massively pervasive consensus that a hardfork requires to perform safely.There are several other points discussed in the email conversation such as more complex economic policy, new game theory, new bidding structure risks, and current SW mining algorithm needs improvement. Finally, Pieter recommends proceeding with a "short term bump" hard fork block size increase along with SW, independent tracks, as orthogonal issues.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T22:52:57.617736+00:00