Author: Gregory Maxwell 2015-05-07 00:37:54
Published on: 2015-05-07T00:37:54+00:00
The discussion around increasing the maximum block size for Bitcoin has been ongoing for several years. While some believe that larger blocks would allow for more transactions and greater scalability, others argue that it could lead to centralization and security risks. The issue of block size involves technical tradeoffs, and making changes to Bitcoin's fundamental scarcity can create winners or losers. Bitcoin exists at the intersection of many different belief systems, and there is not a consensus on its optimal role in society and the commercial marketplace. However, concerns around long-term mining incentives and fee pressure need to be addressed.Ensuring that blocks remain relatively full is important to maintain security, and there is a concern that when subsidy falls below fees, the incentive to move the blockchain forward goes away. The Lightning network proposal could potentially solve many of the scalability issues, but the security and decentralization level of Bitcoin impose an upper limit on anything that can be based on it.The procedure for increasing the block size should involve doubling the hard limit if there is a standing backlog and monitoring indicators to gauge if the network is losing decentralization. Hardfork changes should only be made if they're almost completely uncontroversial. Unfortunately, every indicator except fee totals has been going in the wrong direction almost monotonically along with the blockchain size increase since 2012.Bitcoin Core developers have been working to increase scalability and keep ahead of decentralization loss, but these improvements have been swallowed by the growth. Full node usage is the lowest it's been since 2011, even though the user base is huge now.Increasing the block size to something gigantic like 20MB is not reasonable, as even at 1MB, we'd likely have a smoking hole in the ground if not for existing enormous efforts to make scaling not come at a loss of decentralization. The Lightning network proposal and hashcash-mediated dynamic blocksize limiting are among the ideas being discussed to address scalability concerns.Ultimately, the decision to increase the block size should be carefully considered with proper controls to maintain decentralization and security. The concern is that a future where everyone depends on a small number of "Google scale" node operations for the system is not acceptable.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T20:09:36.056544+00:00