Author: gabe appleton 2015-05-26 05:43:17
Published on: 2015-05-26T05:43:17+00:00
The discussion revolves around the issue of expanding the capacity of the Bitcoin network. There is a concern that changing block time would change the supply curve, and it could affect the rate at which transactions are created. It is suggested that in the future, the average home would have only one full node "hub" receiving the blockchain, which would be peered with high bandwidth full-node relays running at the ISP or in the cloud. This would make full nodes as ubiquitous on the Internet as authoritative DNS servers. There is a debate about whether to decrease the time it takes to make a 1MB block or increase the size of the block to 20MB. Some argue that decreasing the time to create blocks is a band-aid fix and could slow down block propagation and blow out confirmation times. However, one participant argues that we need to increase the amount of transactions that get into blocks over a given time frame to a point that is in line with what current technology can handle. The metric we're closest to being restricted by would be Network bandwidth. Therefore, he suggests that we should go to 20MB as soon as possible and worry about ways to slow down growth without affecting the usefulness of Bitcoin as we get closer to the hard technical limits on our capacity. The participants also discuss the issue of centralization of relays. However, there are enough ISPs and cloud compute providers in the world such that there should be no concern at all about centralization of relays. Full nodes could some day become as ubiquitous on the Internet as authoritative DNS servers. Moreover, if one doesn't trust the nodes their ISP creates or it's too slow or censors transactions, nothing prevents them from peer with nodes hosted by the Googles or OpenDNSs out there, or running their own if they're really paranoid and have a few extra bucks for a VPS.Finally, it is suggested that miners can configure their nodes to only mine transactions with higher fees, and let the miners decide how to charge enough to pay for their costs. There is no need to cripple the network just for them.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:05:31.851820+00:00