Proposed alternatives to the 20MB stepfunction

Summary:

In an email exchange between Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn on the Bitcoin-development mailing list in May 2015, Andresen expressed his opinion that developers should avoid imposing economic policy. He argued that it is dangerous for Bitcoin and the core developers themselves to become a central point of attack for those wishing to disrupt Bitcoin. Instead, he believed that such matters are better left to a decentralized free market. The discussion also touched on the proposed alternatives to the 20MB stepfunction. Hearn questioned why there was fee pressure at the moment, stating that it was turning away users for no purpose, as mining is not supported by fees, and the tiny fees used right now seem to be good enough to stop penny flooding. Andresen replied that he had no opinion on whether there "should" be fee pressure or not, but instead suggested that block propagation should be made faster so that there is no technical reason for miners to produce tiny blocks. Regarding the maximum block size, Hearn suggested setting it to be 20 times the average size, but Andresen found this number to be too large and scary. He proposed using two as a neutral number instead, where if 50% of hashpower wants the max size to grow as fast as possible and 50% are opposed to any increase in max size, then half produce blocks two times as big, half produce empty blocks, and the max size doesn't change. If it was 20, then a small minority of miners could force a max size increase. Andresen ended his email by restating his belief that developers should stay out of deciding economic policies and leave them to the decentralized free market.

Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:45:32.948931+00:00