Author: Jorge Timón 2013-03-11 17:08:03
Published on: 2013-03-11T17:08:03+00:00
In a discussion about micropayments and demurrage in Bitcoin on 3/11/13, Mike Hearn questioned why demurrage is still being brought up when the base rules of Bitcoin will not be changing. He also expressed that minimizing the size of the UTXO set feels like a solution in search of a problem, as even with SD abusing micropayments as messages, it only takes up a few hundred megabytes today and fits in RAM. Hearn suggested that if people do get concerned about the working set size, miners can independently set their own policies for what they confirm and adjust priority accordingly. Hearn argued that trying to ban micropayments with an IsStandard() rule now would risk hurting interesting applications for no real benefit and is like trying to anticipate and fix problems that may arise in 2020. Instead, he recommended less invasive changes for improving scalability, such as making transaction validation multi-threaded in every case, transmitting merkle blocks instead of full blocks, moving blocking disk IO off the main loop so nodes don't go unresponsive when somebody downloads the chain from them, and finishing the payment protocol work so there's less incentive to replicate the SD "transactions as messages" design. Jorge Timón, who initiated the discussion, initially believed that nothing was needed in regards to micropayments and demurrage. However, he disliked the idea of banning micropayments and offered alternative solutions that he considered much better. Despite this, he stated that he would not push for those alternative solutions if nothing is done about the perceived problem. Timón's websites, freico.in and archive.ripple-project.org, are included in his signature.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:32:09.149624+00:00