Author: Eric Lombrozo 2015-07-29 10:43:50
Published on: 2015-07-29T10:43:50+00:00
The email conversation discusses the history of block size limit in Bitcoin. Initially, there was no block size limit, but it was thought that the fee market would develop and impose economic constraints on growth. However, this hypothesis failed after a sudden influx of new users. To avoid degrading user experience due to a potential "DoS block," a one-megabyte block size limit was put in place as a temporary anti-spam measure. The plan was to remove it once Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) wallets were widespread, but they still aren't widely used. Validators validate for themselves, calculating a local UTXO set, which is useless without being used for anything. Non-mining, non-RPC-serving, and non-Qt-wallet-sustaining full nodes are only needed for filtering the chain for bandwidth-constrained SPV wallets, relaying validated transactions for better user interfaces, and storing the mempool and filtering/serving it for SPV wallets to find transactions. Miners who don't validate blocks have a habit of bleeding money, which is the system working as designed. The email also discusses how Bitcoin Core's work fails to meet some arbitrary and undefined level of perfection, and the conversation ends with a discussion of thin clients obtaining short proofs for their transactions.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T04:01:41.782118+00:00