Author: Gavin Andresen 2015-05-31 12:40:35
Published on: 2015-05-31T12:40:35+00:00
The email exchange between Gavin Andresen and Chun Wang discusses the potential issues with 20MB blocks. Wang suggests that it would take at least 6 seconds to receive and verify a 20MB block, resulting in a one percent orphan rate increase. Additionally, there are concerns with bandwidth and the amount of transactions such a block could contain. Andresen suggests punishing miners who create slow blocks by refusing to build on them until they are validated. The orphan rate is currently around 0.5%, but if the network floods 20MB blocks, it could be above 2%. Wang estimates that a 20MB block could contain an average of 50,000 transactions and hundreds of thousands of sigops. Andresen notes that their 30Mbps bandwidth in Beijing costs $1350 per month and they also use Aliyun and Linode cloud services for block propagation. He calculates that handling 20MB blocks would not be a problem and estimates the cost of bandwidth to be less than $2 per day. Wang suggests accepting 5MB blocks at most, but Andresen questions if this concern is due to cost or just feeling like 20MB is too much.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:53:51.396568+00:00