Author: odinn 2015-06-24 01:43:38
Published on: 2015-06-24T01:43:38+00:00
On June 22nd, 2015, Gavin Andresen announced his proposal to replace the one-megabyte maximum block size with a maximum size that grows over time at a predictable rate. The motivation behind this proposal was the growing transaction volume on the Bitcoin network that soon would reach its limit imposed by the one megabyte maximum block size, making it difficult for Bitcoin adoption and growth. After the deployment of this proposal, the maximum allowed size of a block on the main network would be calculated based on the timestamp in the block header.The maximum size would be 8,000,000 bytes at a timestamp of January 11th, 2016, and would double every 63,072,000 seconds (two years, ignoring leap years), until January 6th, 2036. The maximum size of blocks between doublings would increase linearly based on the block's timestamp. The maximum size of blocks after January 6th, 2036, would be 8,192,000,000 bytes. This is a hard-forking change to the Bitcoin protocol, meaning anyone running code that fully validates blocks must upgrade before the activation time, or they will risk rejecting a chain containing larger-than-one-megabyte blocks. Simplified Payment Verification software is not affected unless it makes assumptions about the maximum depth of a transaction's merkle branch based on the minimum size of a transaction and the maximum block size.In response to this proposal, a suggestion was made to work with Jeff Garzik to implement BIP-100 instead. Garzik's proposal suggested a dynamic block size limit that changes every block depending on miner support. However, in reading the link provided, no meaningful statements were found that would refute the approach in Garzik's BIP-100. Relaxation into the process and working together with other developers were some essential suggestions given to Andresen in the email.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T00:30:00.619318+00:00