Author: Gavin Andresen 2015-05-10 21:21:06
Published on: 2015-05-10T21:21:06+00:00
The proposal suggests that each miner should express their preferred block size in their coinbase between a minimum and their effective maximum. The actual block size can be up to the effective maximum even if the preference is lower. 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 on the range [0, computed_maximum] e.g. the miner can double the size of their block at most. If X > 0, then the miners must also reach a target F(x/computed_maximum) times the bits-difficulty; with F(x) = x^2+1. The percentile is intended to give the preferences of the 33% least preferring miners a veto on increases (unless a majority chooses to soft-fork them out). Assuming miners are expressing a desire for 600,000 byte blocks in their coinbases, the computed_max would be 588,462 bytes, about 23 average-size (500-byte) transactions less than 600,000. The effective_max would be 1,176,923 bytes. To maintain status quo at 600,000 bytes, the penalty would be ((600,000-588,462)/588,462)^2 + 1 = 1.00038, which would cost an extra 70 PH out of 186,000PH per block being hashed at 310PetaHash/sec. Thus, the average transaction fee would have to be about ten cents ($2.27 spread across 23 average-sized transactions) for miners to decide to stay at 600K blocks. Any algorithm that ties difficulty to block size is just a complicated way of dictating minimum fees. It is suggested that any other dynamic algorithm would be okay as long as it doesn't grow too quickly and gives some reasonable-percentage-minority of miners the ability to block further increases.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T20:12:29.309931+00:00