Author: David Vorick 2017-03-29 20:28:35
Published on: 2017-03-29T20:28:35+00:00
When considering what block size is acceptable, it's important to take into account the impact of running Bitcoin in the background on affordable, non-dedicated home-hardware. Full nodes are the ultimate arbiters of consensus and running a full node yourself is the only way to guarantee that changes you are opposed to are not introduced into the network. Disk space may only be $2/TB in bulk, but as a home user, 100 GB seems to cost a lot closer to $200 than to $2. Similarly, bandwidth for home nodes is free so long as it is kept under the home bandwidth cap. RAM usage may become a significant factor if it grows enough that people can't have all their programs open at the same time. CPU usage and electricity usage are minimal, so users won't notice much of an impact. However, if transaction fees become too high, there may no longer be a use case for people unwilling to buy extra hardware for Bitcoin, which would result in slower adoption and potential growth issues for Bitcoin's crypto-currency market share. It's worth considering periodically committing the entire UTXO set to a special checkpoint block which becomes the new de facto Genesis block as it would reduce bandwidth pressure on archive nodes, reduce disk pressure on full nodes, and make for a more efficient network overall.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:54:23.681121+00:00