Author: Steven Pine 2015-05-28 18:25:17
Published on: 2015-05-28T18:25:17+00:00
The discussion revolves around the topic of block size and transaction throughput in Bitcoin. While there is a difference between transaction size and block size, they are closely related. Doubling the block size daily could be imprudent as infrastructure takes time to grow, and not everyone can run a node on a virtual Amazon instance. A logarithmic increase in difficulty by 10% or 20% every 2016 blocks would be sufficient, and it would be challenging to plan when the block size changes from week to week. A better approach may be to scale up the block size by 300% every 2016 blocks, which would result in 20mbs within a month or two. However, increasing the block size too quickly could pose problems for smaller nodes, which could get swamped within a week or less. Therefore, it is essential to strike a balance between scaling and maintaining the network's stability. Bitcoin is a global network, and planning around American buying habits seems short-sighted. Regarding scaling, a dynamic block size increase was proposed, with a few questions raised about measuring transactions confirmed directly instead of scaling by average block size. Changes every 2016 blocks were suggested, allowing for reasonable planning periods, but daily size changes seemed confusing, especially if something broke, and fixing it in a day could be problematic. The bottleneck is transaction volume, and blocks won't get bigger unless there are fee-paying transactions to pay them. Planning for a sustained period of time where transaction volume increases by 50% a day seems unlikely.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T20:12:09.185094+00:00