Author: Gregory Maxwell 2015-05-09 03:36:07
Published on: 2015-05-09T03:36:07+00:00
In an email thread, Mark Friedenbach shared his thoughts on the proposed block size increase in Bitcoin. He believes that while techniques to increase block size are better than not having anything, they do not necessarily eliminate the need for a hard upper limit. He argues that without knowing limits, it is difficult to develop, test or provision for something, and there could be hard limits on real deployments. Also, he asserts that increasing the block size does not correct the incentive alignment between miners and everyone else, nor does it reduce centralization pressures. To mitigate these issues, Friedenbach suggests combining a dynamic limit with a hard upper limit. He also proposes changing how the size limit is computed to better align incentives and reduce risk. By factoring in the UTXO impact of transactions, miners would have less income if they create lots of extra outputs when they have room left in their block. Regarding his favored formulation of general dynamic control idea, each miner expresses in their coinbase a preferred size between some minimum (e.g., 500k) and the miner's effective-maximum. There is a computed maximum which is the 33-rd percentile of the last 2016 coinbase preferences minus computed_max/52 bytes, or 500k if that's larger. The effective maximum is X bytes more, where X is on the range [0, computed_maximum]. If X > 0, then the miners must also reach a target F(x/computed_maximum) times the bits-difficulty.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T20:17:12.584635+00:00