Author: Jeff Garzik 2015-06-15 02:44:22
Published on: 2015-06-15T02:44:22+00:00
The conversation revolves around Jeff Garzik's outline draft BIP 100, which is about Bitcoin's block size increase proposal. The latest draft includes an explicit 32MB ceiling with users having to opt into growth beyond it via a second hard fork. While there should be a measured pace of transition from policy A to policy B in order to assess system effectiveness and allow free market input, there is disagreement over whether or not there should be a growth limiter (no more than X%/year) as it veers into personal opinion about what economic policy should be. Regarding the miners' vote on block size increase, the group discusses Greg Maxwell's difficulty adjust proposal, which puts quadratic cost via higher difficulty for miners to vote to increase block-size. However, this proposal has severe negative elements that will likely cause it never to be used. Instead, paying bitcoins to future miners makes more sense. There is also a natural equilibrium block size that the free market and user choice will seek.The conversation then shifts to Bitcoin involving layering models that uplift security to higher layers, preserve security assurances, and smart-contracts even, with protocols that improve the algorithmic complexity beyond O(n^2) in users, like lightning. One thing of concern is that few in industry seem inclined to take any development initiatives or even integrate a library. It is necessary to expose companies to the back-pressure actually implied by an O(n^2) scaling protocol. Otherwise, increasing the block-size to levels that are dangerous for decentralization security may risk the whole saga repeating in a few years when no algorithmic progress has been made and even more protocol inertia has set in. The conversation also includes links to related proposals and discussions on Reddit and the Bitcoin-development mailing list.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:06:07.897672+00:00