Author: Aaron Voisine 2015-05-14 00:48:41
Published on: 2015-05-14T00:48:41+00:00
The debate over increasing the block size as a solution to scalability is ongoing in the Bitcoin community. While there are concerns that placing hard limits on block size could harm the reliability of propagated transactions getting into blocks, some argue that there are still plenty of options to increase fees and incentivize users to economize on block space. Child-pays-for-parent and Replace-by-fee are two such options; however, they have their own limitations. The CEO of breadwallet.com argues that there is $3 billion plus of value in the system to defend and that increasing the block size is the conservative course of action. Miners already have an incentive to encourage higher fees, and standard recommended propagation rules and hybrid priority/fee transaction selection for blocks can help them achieve this while also increasing confirmation delays for low fee transactions. Some members of the community, however, believe that payment channels are a more viable solution to scalability than increasing the block size. They argue that increasing the block size would simply be kicking the can down the road and reducing incentives to deploy real solutions like payment channels. There are concerns about the future of Bitcoin's security when the block subsidy becomes insignificant, but some believe that there are motivated, smart, and hard-working people who will make it work. In the meantime, the community should focus on the debate over hardforks rather than the block size debate. A clear criterion for what is acceptable for a hardfork and a general plan to deploy them is needed, with questions raised about whether all the hardfork changes need to be uncontroversial, and whether small hardfork fixes should be deployed at the same time as necessary ones.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T20:44:40.955558+00:00