Author: Cameron Garnham 2015-05-30 01:36:39
Published on: 2015-05-30T01:36:39+00:00
The proposal of a consensus protocol for block sizes is gaining attention. The core point is that miners hold the power to decide what goes into blocks and how large they are. The proposal introduces a constant factor above the average block size over fixed intervals that is soft-forked by only the miners. This proposal is entirely a soft-fork and may be implemented without changing any client code whatsoever. The nice thing about this is that it really is impossible to stop, for example, if pre-relaying of block headers is implemented; the miners could always soft-fork to include the block-size in the coinbase. Miners operate in a way to collectively maximize profit; then we can assume they will not try to maximize utility of the network (having as many transactions as possible), rather have as few transactions as the total economy can support the cost. The proposal includes the use of game theory and deduction to pick the type of agreement that would be natural for the miners to come to. The block size cap should be set in the same way as we set difficulty. Every 2016 blocks take the average size of the blocks and multiply the size by 1.5x, rejecting blocks that are larger than this size, for the next 2016 period. The limits should be kept at min 100kb and max (initially) 990kb, rounding up to the nearest 10kb. This could be implemented by the miners without breaking any of the clients, and would tend to produce a better dynamic fee pressure.This infrastructure can be implemented without needing to update any clients. Once implemented, tested, solid, and well accepted by the (mining) community then we can revisit increasing the 1M hard limit. If we still have demand for it, maybe the average block size will reduce to say, 100KB. The entire proposal is a soft fork that can be initiated by a simple 51% majority of miners.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T20:11:21.554878+00:00