Author: Ross Nicoll 2015-05-07 18:21:47
Published on: 2015-05-07T18:21:47+00:00
The discussion about hard forks in Bitcoin has brought up concerns about the difficulty and risk involved. It is suggested that a decision on block size changes should be made soon so that the code can be committed, making it easier for new installs and upgrades to use the new version. However, there is disagreement about the urgency of the situation. The author believes that 7 transactions per second is too limited, even if the main chain only acts as a backbone between other chains and transaction networks. They suggest a schedule of expansion, increasing the block size to 2mb in 2016, 4mb in 2018, 8mb in 2020, and 20mb in 2022. This would provide enough pressure to motivate scaling work while not limiting Bitcoin too much. The author also suggests that more work is needed on fees. Currently, fees and transactions included are fairly naive, and the absolute block size limit should be a hard upper bound with miners imposing soft limits based on various factors such as cost of storage and risk of orphan blocks. Finally, the author asks for numbers on block size vs orphan rate to better inform these decisions.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T19:44:06.885277+00:00