Author: Alan Reiner 2015-05-07 19:31:46
Published on: 2015-05-07T19:31:46+00:00
This urgent matter needs to be handled immediately and Gavin's approach is believed to be the most effective. Gavin's talks on increasing the block size have two persuasive points, first being that blocks are nearing full now which means that the reliability of the network from an average user perspective will be impacted negatively due to inconsistent time between blocks. His simulations show that 400 kB - 600 kB worth of transactions per 10 min (approximately 3-4 tps) is where things start to behave poorly for certain classes of transactions; meaning we are very close to the effective limit in terms of maintaining the current "standard of living", and with a year needed to raise the block time this is indeed urgent. Secondly, leveraging fee pressure at 1MB to solve the problem is actually a bad idea as it ignores the fact that 7 tps is too low for any meaningful commercial activity to occur. If we continue with a cap of 7 tps forever, Bitcoin will fail or at best, it will fail to be useful for the vast majority of the world which probably leads to failure. Alan believes that Satoshi didn't believe 1 MB blocks were the correct answer and personally thinks this is critical to Bitcoin's long term future.Although side chains and payment channels could alleviate this issue, it is still a far-fetched idea considering how far off they are. Even if everyone used them, getting a billion people onto the system just can't happen even at 1 transaction per year per person to get into a payment channel or move money between side chains. This limit of 7 tps makes corporate clients uncomfortable that they are going to invest all this time into a system that has no chance of handling the economic activity that they expect it to handle, despite being assured that 7 tps is not the final answer.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T19:33:46.411504+00:00