Author: Tom Harding 2015-06-18 22:00:39
Published on: 2015-06-18T22:00:39+00:00
In a discussion between Pieter Wuille and Jonas Nick, Pieter suggests that larger blocks lead to centralization pressure in the system. Jonas responds by pointing out that in Pieter's scenario, where big miners are part of the majority partition, it is unclear whether the pressure to merge with big miners can be separated from the pressure to connect with the majority partition. To test this, Jonas runs a simulation with a large miner in a 20% minority partition and 16 small miners in an 80% majority partition; to increase realism, the simulation includes a "slow link" speed of 100 Mbit/s. The results of the simulation show that making small blocks when others are making big ones is bad, and fees become enormous. Being separated by a slow link from the majority hash power is also bad. However, being a small miner with blocksize=20MB is not bad. The simulation uses four different configurations which demonstrate the effects of block size and fee per byte on the income of two miner groups with different hashrates.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T22:50:26.559107+00:00