Author: Stephen Pair 2013-02-13 23:10:21
Published on: 2013-02-13T23:10:21+00:00
Gavin Andresen and Gregory Maxwell had a discussion about the hard limit on block size in Bitcoin, with Maxwell stating that the security and decentralization promises of Bitcoin can't be met without block space scarcity to drive non-trivial fees. Andresen disagrees with this notion as he believes that Bitcoin can meet its security and decentralization promises without any hard limit on block size. Andresen suggested that it's not blocks that should be used to impose any sort of scarcity, but rather it's the costs associated with the validation and propagation of the transactions themselves. Nodes can start to charge fees to collect and distribute transactions and blocks, and collectors of such nodes could pool together fees to ensure connected nodes can propagate and hear about transactions and blocks. Miners would have a lot of incentive to pay for such services since they will want to get access to as many fee-bearing transactions as possible. Andresen also mentioned that micropayment channels could be used as the payment method for nodes that validate and relay transactions.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:04:39.776582+00:00