Author: Matt Corallo 2015-07-24 02:48:03
Published on: 2015-07-24T02:48:03+00:00
A Bitcoin-dev mailing list post from 2015 discusses testing the Bitcoin network's maximum throughput to determine if it can safely support a faster block rate. Nodes were randomly selected from peers.dat, and 5% of reachable nodes were contacted. A random selection of blocks was then downloaded from each peer. Raw data with one line per connected node, kilobytes per second, is available in a pastebin link. The results showed that 37% of connected nodes failed to upload blocks faster than 1MB/s, while 16% uploaded blocks faster than 10MB/s. This suggests that the network does not have the available bandwidth for increased block sizes. 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. For comparison, only 10% fail this metric for 1MB blocks.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T20:54:24.554669+00:00