Author: Christian Decker 2017-01-27 21:28:10
Published on: 2017-01-27T21:28:10+00:00
On January 27th, 2017, Greg Sanders via bitcoin-dev stated that the 4MB number mentioned in regards to Bitcoin comes from a single network metric. He referred to a paper which defines effective throughput as blocks that propagate within an average block interval period and the percentage of nodes to which they propagate. The paper goes on to mention that their results may be viewed as upper bounds due to the difficulty in accurately measuring other metrics. Sanders emphasized that this single metric is one of many that must be taken into account and that it says nothing about mining centralization pressure or DoS attacks. One of the authors of the aforementioned paper responded by explaining that the 4MB number is meant to be an optimistic upper bound for today's network capacity. However, they also noted that it is not a binary situation where there is a clear threshold beyond which Bad Things (TM) happen. Rather, it is a spectrum with a few known thresholds beyond which Bad Things definitely occur. Miner centralization pressure is felt earlier than other negative effects.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T21:17:33.151348+00:00