Author: Gavin Andresen 2015-06-23 20:12:17
Published on: 2015-06-23T20:12:17+00:00
On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Peter Todd wrote an email discussing the block size increase of Bitcoin. The rationale behind choosing the initial size of 8,000,000 bytes was based on testing and feedback from miners stuck behind bandwidth-constrained networks, especially Chinese miners behind the Great Firewall of China. The doubling interval and the 20-year limit were chosen based on long-term growth trends for CPU power, storage, and Internet bandwidth. However, Wladimir noted that the original presented intention of block size increase was a one-time "scaling" to grant time for more decentralizing solutions to develop.The consensus is that going through this process once a year is too painful. Simulations show that latency/bandwidth matters for miners, but by the time transaction fees become significant, protocol optimizations of block propagation will make the block size an insignificant term in the equation. For the immediate future and the long term, there seems to be no problem with the current block size.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T00:20:43.419799+00:00