Author: Jared Lee Richardson 2017-03-29 19:10:42
Published on: 2017-03-29T19:10:42+00:00
There is currently a lack of consensus on the need for increasing blocksize in Bitcoin. The proportion of users who believe that no blocksize increases are needed is larger than the hardfork target core wants, which stands at 95% consensus. Similarly, the proportion of users believing in microtransactions for all is also larger than 5%, and both of these groups may be larger than 10% respectively. Furthermore, neither the Big-blocks faction nor the low-node-costs faction have even a simple majority of support. In order to agree upon any blocksize increase, more consensus is needed, but this is going to be a big mess. Martin Lízner proposed a conservative approach in case of a hard fork. If there should be a hard-fork, the Core team should author the code because other dev teams have marginal support among all BTC users. Lízner suggests fixing historical BTC issues, improving the code, planning HF activation date well ahead (12 months+), allowing increasing block size on a year-to-year basis as Luke suggested, compromising with miners on an initial block size bump (e.g. 2MB) and implementing SegWit. Meanwhile, Wang Chun has proposed a hard fork approach where a patch would be coded right now to remove the block size limit of 1MB but not activate it until far in the future, specifically at the next block halving in spring 2020. The block size will only be limited to 32MiB which is the maximum size the current p2p protocol allows. With this patch in core's next release, Bitcoin works just as before, and no fork will ever occur until spring 2020. This gives third party services, libraries, wallets and exchanges enough time to prepare for it over the next three years. In addition, this patch makes all hard fork proposals become soft fork proposals, providing enough time to discuss all the proposals and decide which one to go. For instance, if they choose to fork to only 2MB, since 32MiB is already scheduled, reducing it from 32MiB to 2MB will be a soft fork. According to Chun, something must be coded right now before it becomes too late.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:54:13.965703+00:00