Author: Mark Friedenbach 2015-06-22 21:52:32
Published on: 2015-06-22T21:52:32+00:00
In June 2015, Gavin Andresen proposed a replacement for the current one-megabyte maximum block size in Bitcoin with a maximum size that grows over time at a predictable rate. The proposal aims to increase the maximum size, which reduces the impact of the limit on Bitcoin adoption and growth. The maximum allowed size of a block on the network shall be calculated based on the timestamp in the block header after deployment. The maximum size shall be 8,000,000 bytes at a timestamp of 2016-01-11 00:00:00 UTC and shall double every 63,072,000 seconds (two years) until 2036-01-06 00:00:00 UTC. The maximum size of blocks in between doublings will increase linearly based on the block's timestamp. The maximum size of blocks after 2036-01-06 00:00:00 UTC shall be 8,192,000,000 bytes. The deployment shall be controlled by hash-power supermajority vote, but the earliest possible activation time is 2016-01-11 00:00:00 UTC. Activation is achieved when 750 of 1,000 consecutive blocks in the best chain have a version number with bits 3 and 14 set. The initial size of 8,000,000 bytes was chosen after testing the current reference implementation code with larger block sizes and receiving feedback from miners stuck behind bandwidth-constrained networks. The doubling interval was chosen based on long-term growth trends for CPU power, storage, and Internet bandwidth, while the 20-year limit was chosen because exponential growth cannot continue forever. This proposal is a hard-forking change to the Bitcoin protocol that requires anyone running code that fully validates blocks to upgrade before the activation time.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T00:28:31.605164+00:00