Author: Patrick Strateman 2015-06-26 18:47:37
Published on: 2015-06-26T18:47:37+00:00
The discussion on whether or not to increase the blocksize limit and plan for a hard fork in the future continues. It is agreed that planning for a hard fork is important, but there is no clear consensus on changing the blocksize limit without potentially negative consequences. For a proposed hard fork to be safe, there needs to be a clear and self-evident course of action, which does not exist on the blocksize limit question. Jeff Garzik argues that failure to plan now for a hard fork increase six months in the future produces unpredictable market behavior that could lead to businesses shelving plans to use bitcoin and not bother putting those new users on the network. Garzik believes that waiting until the need to increase block size is acute is too late because businesses have permanently shelved plans to use bitcoin and the change at that point produces larger disruption to the fee market. Hard forks require planning many months in advance. Pieter Wuille disagrees with Garzik's argument that economic change is what we want, saying that it is inevitable, independent of whether larger blocks happen or not. He believes that acting because of fear of economic change is a bad reason and that the reason for an increase should be because of the higher utility. Wuille thinks that some use cases won't fit anymore, people will decide to no longer use the blockchain for these purposes, and the fees will adapt. He says that this is already happening and will happen at any scale, and that demand for payments in general is nearly infinite, and only a small portion of it will eventually fit on a blockchain. Systems that compete with Bitcoin in this space already offer orders of magnitude more capacity than we can reasonably achieve with any blockchain technology at this point. Wuille thinks that none of this is a reason why the size can't increase, but it should be done because it increases utility and understands the risks, not because of fear of what might happen if we don't hurry up. From that point of view, it seems silly to make a huge increase at once.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T01:09:20.108574+00:00