Author: Pieter Wuille 2015-07-30 14:28:29
Published on: 2015-07-30T14:28:29+00:00
The email conversation between Gavin Andresen and Pieter Wuille revolves around the issue of scaling up Bitcoin's block size. Pieter suggests that the block size should be scaled gradually over time in accordance with technological growth, which is exactly what BIP101 intends to do. However, Gavin questions the immediate increase to 8 MB while miners don't seem to validate blocks and proposes a future where miners are even more centralized than now, which avoids all problems relay and propagation speed has.Gavin also raises concerns about the lack of a concrete scalability road map and plan. He suggests waiting for Blockstream Elements to be ready for deployment on the main network and then introducing all the scalability work such as Segregated Witness and Lightning in one grand hardfork. He notes that Lightning does not require a hard fork expect that larger blocks would be useful for its bulk settlements.Pieter counters that sidechains are a mechanism for experimentation, and people moving their coins to a sidechain has far worse security tradeoffs than just increasing the Bitcoin blockchain. He proposes a plan he was working on, which can be found on Github. Gavin emphasizes that any plan which requires inventing brand-new technology is riskier than scaling up what already exists. He believes that it is worthwhile to scale up what we have in addition to working on great projects like Segregated Witness and Lightning.Finally, they discuss the fear that the current block size "won't be enough," but Pieter believes that Bitcoin has utility at any block size, and perhaps more at some values for it than others. Talking about "not enough" is acknowledging that we really believe the block size should scale to demand, while it is the other way around.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T20:55:21.672643+00:00