Author: Peter Todd 2015-07-23 16:05:11
Published on: 2015-07-23T16:05:11+00:00
A discussion on Bitcoin development was initiated by a post on the bitcoin-dev mailing list on July 23, 2015. The post suggested that the network does not have sufficient bandwidth to support increased block sizes. The author noted that in the current state of the network, 37% of nodes would fail to upload a 20MB block to a single peer in less than 20 seconds. If the criteria for suitability is set at taking only 1% of the block time (6 seconds) to upload one block to one peer, then 69% of the network fails for 20MB blocks. This is compared to only 10% failing this metric for 1MB blocks. One caveat to these findings is that they are likely optimistic due to generally asymmetric bandwidth. The measurements were taken for download capacity, while upload capacity is further reduced by the fact that multiple peers at once need to be sent blocks for reliability. Additionally, the network needs significant additional margin to resist attack as performance is consensus-critical.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T03:33:11.279697+00:00