Author: Damian Williamson 2017-12-23 01:24:28
Published on: 2017-12-23T01:24:28+00:00
Damian Williamson has proposed a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) to address two issues with Bitcoin: scalability with fixed block size and ensuring that all valid transactions are eventually included in the blockchain. The proposal suggests using transaction priority for ordering transactions in blocks, with the next block size determined by the average number of non-zero fee transactions in the mempool. While some have criticized the proposal, Williamson argues that it is necessary to partially ignore short-term gain for long-term benefit and that miners will conform to the proposal. The current transaction bandwidth limit of Bitcoin is a limiting factor for both miners and consumers, as it limits the operational safety of transactions and therefore, consumer confidence. To resolve this issue, the proposal suggests removing the possibility of sending a transaction with a fee lower than one that is acceptable to allow eventual transaction confirmation from the protocol and user interface. Each transaction will be provided with an individual transaction priority each time before choosing transactions to include in the current block, which will be a function of the fee paid and the time waiting in the transaction pool. The proposed solution also suggests using a target block size, determined by current transaction pool size x (1/(144 x n days)) = number of transactions to be included in the current block. The curves used for the priority of transactions would have to be appropriate, and the operation of the proposed solution will need to be determined in a spec for the programmer. Overall, the proposal aims to create a more robust and reliable transaction system that can meet the demands of businesses and consumers. It maximizes transaction reliability, is fully scalable, maximizes the possibility for consumer and business uptake, maximizes total fees paid per block without reducing reliability, and provides additional block entropy for greater security. However, it could initially lower total transaction fees per block and must be first programmed. If not this proposal, an alternative method should be used to validate full transaction reliability and enable scalability of block sizes.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T22:53:24.460160+00:00