Author: Marcel Jamin 2015-07-23 19:56:36
Published on: 2015-07-23T19:56:36+00:00
On July 23, 2015, a discussion took place on the bitcoin-dev mailing list regarding the available bandwidth of the Bitcoin network for increased block sizes. A member named slurms stated that based on Gavin's numbers, 37% of nodes would fail to upload a 20MB block to a single peer in under 20 seconds. Further, if the bar for suitability is placed 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. In comparison, only 10% of the network fails this metric for 1MB blocks. However, Peter Todd pointed out that due to bandwidth being generally asymmetric, the findings may be optimistic as only download capacity was measured. Additionally, multiple peers at once need to be sent blocks for reliability, further reducing upload capacity. Todd also noted that the network wasn't under attack during measurement and additional margin was needed to resist attack as performance is consensus-critical. The discussion focused on measuring the upload capacity of peers by downloading from them.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T03:34:04.844009+00:00