Author: Anthony Towns 2015-12-17 03:52:22
Published on: 2015-12-17T03:52:22+00:00
In a discussion on bitcoin-dev mailing list, Pieter Wuille proposed defining the virtual block size as the base size plus witness size multiplied by 0.25, and limiting it to 1MB, creating a single variable to optimize for. Jeff Garzik disagreed with the proposal, stating that there are two separate sets of economic actors and levels of contention for each set of space. However, Pieter's segwit proposal has two consensus-limited resources: the number of signature ops in the base block, which must be no more than 20k, and the virtual block size, which must be no more than 1MB. Nodes and miners have other constraints such as bandwidth, storage, and CPU, but these limits aren't enforced by consensus and can be adjusted as technology improves. On the supply side, the optimal fee maximizing strategy is always to maximize fee per virtual size, modulo sigop constraints, same as today for fee per base block size. On the demand side, there might be people who can trade off witness data for base data at different ratios, but since the ratio is fixed, there's no bartering to be done.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T22:53:14.165488+00:00