Author: Mark Friedenbach 2015-06-24 17:05:42
Published on: 2015-06-24T17:05:42+00:00
In June 2015, Bitcoin developers had a discussion about increasing the maximum block size for transactions. Gavin Andresen proposed a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) that suggested replacing the fixed one-megabyte maximum block size with a maximum size that grows over time at a predictable rate. The proposal recommended that the maximum allowed size of a block on the main network should be calculated based on the timestamp in the block header.The proposal stated that the maximum size of a block should be 8,000,000 bytes at a timestamp of 2016-01-11 00:00:00 UTC. It would then double every 63,072,000 seconds (two years, ignoring leap years) until 2036-01-06 00:00:00 UTC. The deployment of this proposal would be controlled by hash-power supermajority vote. A 75% supermajority was chosen so that one large mining pool does not have effective veto power over a block-size increase. However, during the discussion, Jeff Garzik argued that miners could collude to lower the block size limit, which often happens already out of laziness. William Madden raised concerns about Gavin's proposal, stating that it introduces an untested dynamic into an already complex system and can be unnecessarily risky. He proposed that a simple 8mb cap with predictable growth gets the job done, potentially permanently. Another developer, odinn, suggested working with Jeff Garzik to implement his BIP-100 proposal, which he believes is better than Gavin's proposal.It is important to note that Gavin's proposal is a hard-forking change to the Bitcoin protocol. Anybody 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. For those interested in learning more about the Bitcoin network and its development, there are several mailing lists related to Bitcoin-dev that can be subscribed to through the links provided. Additionally, the link provided leads to the Github page of Gavin Andresen's Bitcoin XT project, which has a branch for the blocksize fork.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T00:27:00.539781+00:00