Author: Peter Todd 2015-05-07 01:49:52
Published on: 2015-05-07T01:49:52+00:00
In a discussion about Bitcoin, Matt Corallo argues against any commitment to an increase in block size, saying that fee pressure and consistently full blocks are necessary for long-term incentive compatibility. He refers to a paper called "The Economics of Bitcoin Transaction Fees" which suggests that without either a fixed block size or fixed fee per transaction, Bitcoin will not survive in the long-term. Peter Todd agrees with this conclusion and believes that a fixed block size is necessary as implementing a fixed fee per transaction meaningful is non-trivial. Todd also expresses concern about startups with unrealistic ideas about scaling their on-blockchain businesses and emphasizes the need for accurate and honest advice about blockchain's scalability. He criticizes the Bitcoin wiki page on scalability and bitcoin.org developer documentation for not mentioning scalability. Todd believes that increasing the block size even to 20MB would greatly reduce the number of people who can participate fully in Bitcoin and lead to further centralization. He questions what mechanism will create an incentive and social consensus to scale up Bitcoin the hard way and mentions John Dillon's proof-of-stake block size vote as the only proposal that attempts to do so but has yet to gain consensus.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T19:30:58.613729+00:00