Author: Ryan X. Charles 2015-05-17 02:31:10
Published on: 2015-05-17T02:31:10+00:00
The debate on increasing the block size of Bitcoin is gaining momentum with some factions arguing that a small block size will force Bitcoin to become too expensive for individuals to use, while others claim that larger blocks will make it impossible for most people to own a single utxo. At the current block size of 1 MB, far less than 1% of people will ever be able to own even a single Satoshi, which means that they will either not use Bitcoin or use a substitute that lacks the full trust-minimized security guarantees of the main blockchain. The thing that matters most to an individual, besides being able to send bitcoin to and from anyone on the planet, is being able to validate the blockchain. With a pruning node, an individual only needs to download the blockchain one time and maintain the utxo set, which is roughly 30 bytes per utxo. Therefore, at one utxo per person, about 210 GB is required, which is achievable with today's hardware. If each person has ten utxos, that would require approximately 2.1 TB, also achievable with current hardware. However, the current block size of 1 MB makes it unsuitable for everyone in the world to have their transactions settled within a reasonable timescale suitable for human life. To settle trillions of transactions per day on networks built on top of Bitcoin, we would need to support about 1 utxo per person per day, or 7 billion transactions per day, translating to approximately 81 thousand transactions per second, 10,000 times the current rate. This would require 10 GB blocks and is achievable on current hardware. Using SPV security rather than pruning security makes the cost even lower. If capacity grows and fewer individuals can run full nodes, those individuals would have to give up running a full-node wallet. However, if more parts of the network itself rely on SPV-level security, it may still be possible for individuals collectively to make up the majority of the network. With SPV-level security, it might be possible to implement a scalable DHT-type network of nodes that collectively store and index the extensive and fast-growing corpus of transaction history, up to and including currently unconfirmed transactions.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:03:39.249185+00:00