Block Size Increase

Summary:

In a discussion about block size increase, Tier Nolan suggests that the maximum block size merchants and users will accept puts a reasonable limit on the maximum size miners can increase the block size to. Matt Corallo argues against committing to a block size increase in the near future, stating that it allows the Bitcoin ecosystem to continue building systems which rely on transactions moving quickly into blocks while pretending these systems scale. He suggests that instead of focusing on building centralized platforms and advocating for changes to Bitcoin that allow them to maintain the status quo, the ecosystem should be working on technologies that bring Bitcoin's trustlessness to systems which scale beyond a blockchain's necessarily slow and expensive settlement. When asked if he would accept a rule that sets the maximum size to 20MB but gives miners an efficient method for choosing a lower size, Nolan proposes that miners could specify the maximum block size in their block headers and coordinate to adjust the block size, with votes being counted every 2016 blocks. He also suggests adding an auxiliary header to the hard-fork, which would help with commitments and provide ASIC miners with a fast way to regenerate the merkle root. Corallo argues that giving miners free rule to do anything they like with their blocks would allow them to do any number of crazy attacks, so the hard block size limit is necessary to maintain a decentralized network.

Updated on: 2023-05-19T20:10:17.111135+00:00