Author: Benedict Chan 2015-07-23 23:42:42
Published on: 2015-07-23T23:42:42+00:00
In this conversation among developers on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Eric Lombrozo states that mainstream usage of cryptocurrency will be enabled by direct party-to-party contract negotiation and the blockchain will primarily serve as a dispute resolution mechanism. The block size debate is not about scaling, but rather about supply and demand of finite resources. Lombrozo suggests that increasing computational resources (block size) or fees could address increasing demand for block space, but there needs to be a way to offset the increase in cost to incentivize those who contribute resources. He also acknowledges that improvements in hardware and network infrastructure can reduce costs and increase resource requirements as technology improves, but the computational cost of validation is growing faster than computational resources are decreasing. Jorge Timón agrees with Jameson Lopp's point that without a common notion of "minimal target hardware", it is difficult to discuss other things that depend on that. Timón suggests that if there is data showing a minimal viable full node can operate on a low-spec device like a Raspberry Pi with a 1 MB connection in India, then rising the block size to that level would be uncontroversial. However, there is no established baseline for acceptable performance/hardware cost requirements to run a node, and the discussion about formalizing such requirements has not progressed beyond agreement that it should be done. Lombrozo believes that scaling the network will come in the form of many optimizations, and blocking change due to other improvements being more important will further slow down discussions.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T03:11:54.691526+00:00