Author: Yifu Guo 2016-02-09 13:59:01
Published on: 2016-02-09T13:59:01+00:00
Happy Lunar New Year everyone! The context of this discussion is about the proposed increase in block size from 1 MB to 2 MB and the potential impact on the Bitcoin network. Gavin Andresen suggests that there are a significant percentage of un-maintained full nodes, which could be as much as 30 to 40%. However, this assumption is not supported by data from personal snapshots taken in December 2015, which show that there are only 406 nodes that fall under the un-maintained category, below 10% of the network. Andresen argues that losing those nodes will not be a problem for three reasons: first, the network could shrink by 60% and still have plenty of open connection slots; second, people are committing to spinning up thousands of supports-2mb-nodes during the grace period; third, waiting a year would only pick up 10 to 20% more. However, others disagree with his assertions, stating that dropping support for 60% of the nodes on the network when rolling out an upgrade is not the sane default. The discussion also touches on the technical aspects of the proposed upgrade, such as the amount of data hashed to compute signature hashes being limited to 1,300,000,000 bytes per block. There are advantages to a very high limit, including eliminating special-case code for dealing with old blocks and avoiding complicated bin-packing problems to optimize for fees paid. Additionally, SPV wallets are compatible with this change. There are some controversial points in the draft, including the sentence that states that an increase is needed to continue the current economic policies with regards to fees and block space, matching market expectations and preventing market disruption. Some argue that this sentence should be made more subjective or removed entirely. It is also suggested that any hard fork should address at least the simple tasks on the hard fork wishlist and be deployed as a soft-hardfork to not leave old nodes entirely insecure.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T03:43:58.944107+00:00