Author: Johnson Lau 2017-03-29 15:34:41
Published on: 2017-03-29T15:34:41+00:00
In an email thread on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Emin Gün Sirer disagreed with some of the conclusions made in a study that he co-authored. He stated that the 4MB size suggested in the paper should not be used without compensation for two important changes to the network. Recent measurements of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network show that network speeds have improved tremendously and the emergence of high-speed block relay networks and block compression has changed the picture dramatically. According to Sirer, the 4MB limit mentioned in the paper should not be used as a protocol limit today.Juan Garavaglia, who was also part of the email thread, expressed his opinion that if the 1MB limit was okay in 2010, then an 8MB limit is acceptable in 2016 and a 32MB limit valid in the next halving from a network, storage, and CPU perspective. However, Alphonse Pace referred to a paper which showed that even 4MB was unsafe.A proposal for a hard fork approach to increase the block size limit in Bitcoin was recently discussed via email among developers. The proposal suggests removing the 1MB block size limit, but not activating it until far in the future, specifically at the next block halving in spring 2020 and only limiting the block size to 32MiB which is the maximum size the current p2p protocol allows. This enables third party services, libraries, wallets and exchanges to have enough time to prepare for it over the next three years. With this patch in core's next release, Bitcoin works just as before, no fork will ever occur, until spring 2020.The proposal has been met with mixed reactions from the community, with some arguing that waiting until SegWit activates would be better in order to truly measure the effects on the network from this increased capacity before committing to any additional increases. Removing the limit but relying on the p2p protocol is not really a true 32MiB limit, but a limit of whatever transport methods provide. This can lead to differing consensus if alternative layers for relaying are used.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T01:16:47.653511+00:00