Author: Aaron Voisine 2015-06-28 01:52:55
Published on: 2015-06-28T01:52:55+00:00
The email thread discusses the debate about block size and hard-forks in Bitcoin. The CEO of breadwallet.com suggests limiting growth of the blockchain and having fees that reflect the costs of having large numbers of people validating, storing, and serving transactions to achieve the goal of letting hobbyists with limited resources and connectivity run full nodes. The current technique to discourage spam and other low value uses of the blockchain is through minimum relay fees and transaction selection rules for blocks. Another contributor to the thread argues that the current debate is about the nature of Bitcoin and what it means to people and how it will grow, rather than just block size and hard-forks. They interpret the original author's intent as enabling mining through operating full network nodes, with proceeds from mining providing a reason to continue running these nodes. They suggest that if fees are ever to be a sufficient reward and still allow for a practical and useful system, the size of the blocks must grow significantly, and the user base must expand. The contributor further suggests that the original author intended organizations operating full network nodes to provide connectivity to light clients, which would make up the majority of the user base. They argue that having the system entirely decentralized and trustless for every client does not appear to be the original design goal, and that some amount of localized trust may be necessary. The global decentralized consensus appears meant to make the network resilient to a single government or other adversary's ability to shut the network down.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T01:35:26.961383+00:00