Author: Matt Corallo 2017-03-28 17:13:09
Published on: 2017-03-28T17:13:09+00:00
In a recent email exchange between Bitcoin developers, concerns were raised over the potential risks of implementing a hard fork to increase block size. The developer, Matt, worries about the lack of consensus on how much to soft fork down and how this might negatively impact the security of Bitcoin. One proposal discussed is based on historical transaction growth, but this would result in a relatively low number (around 2MB at the next halving), which SegWit already provides. Another proposal is to focus on designing a hard fork's activation and technical details, with a much larger block size increase (closer to 4/6MB at the next halving) intended to be eventually soft forked back down if miner profits start suffering.Another developer, Wang Chun, proposed a different approach last year in Hong Kong Consensus, which was rejected by coredevs at that meeting. He suggests coding a patch now to remove the block size limit of 1MB, but not activating it until spring 2020, at the next block halving. With this patch in the next release of Bitcoin Core, there will be no fork until spring 2020, giving third party services, libraries, wallets, and exchanges enough time to prepare for it over the next three years. All previous hard fork proposals, such as BIP100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 148, 248, BU, etc., become soft forks with this patch already in Core's release. This gives sufficient time to discuss all these proposals and decide which one to go with.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T01:17:50.871409+00:00