Author: Jameson Lopp 2015-07-23 15:55:14
Published on: 2015-07-23T15:55:14+00:00
On July 23, 2015, a test was performed on the Bitcoin network to determine if it could safely support a faster block rate. The testing methodology involved randomly selecting nodes from a peers.dat file and contacting 5% of the reachable nodes in the network. A random selection of blocks was then downloaded from each peer. Results showed that 37% of connected nodes failed to upload blocks faster than 1MB/s and only 16% uploaded blocks faster than 10MB/s. Raw data can be found here: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=6b4NuiVQ. This data does not support the theory that the network has the available bandwidth for increased block sizes, as 37% of nodes would fail to upload a 20MB block to a single peer in under 20 seconds. For comparison, only 10% fail this metric for 1MB blocks. The testing was conducted by slurms--- via bitcoin-dev mailing list. Jameson requested the code used to run the test.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T03:33:00.810480+00:00