Author: Gavin Andresen 2015-05-31 12:52:45
Published on: 2015-05-31T12:52:45+00:00
In an email conversation in 2015, Gavin Andresen discussed the potential impact of a 20MB block size on the Bitcoin network. He noted that if someone propagated a 20MB block, it would take at best six seconds to verify it with the current configuration, resulting in a one percent orphan rate increase. However, this increase would go to whoever is producing the 20MB blocks and not the receiver. Andresen suggested punishing miners who create slow-to-propagate big blocks by refusing to build on them until they were fully validated. Andresen also noted that their orphan rate was about 0.5% over the past few months. Still, if the network flooded 20MB blocks, it could be above 2%, and a 20MB block could contain around 50,000 transactions and hundreds of thousands of sigops. He estimated how long it takes on the submitblock rpccall and said he could benchmark it, but it should be pretty fast. In terms of bandwidth cost, Andresen indicated that their 30Mbps bandwidth in Beijing costs them $1,350 per month. They also use Aliyun and Linode cloud services for block propagation, and as of May 2015, the price was $0.13 per GB for 100Mbps connectivity at Aliyun. If each 20MB block is 100MB of data up/down the wire, then they would be paying approximately $57 per day in bandwidth costs. Finally, Andresen suggested accepting 5MB blocks at most, but it is unclear whether he was concerned about the cost or the practicality of handling larger blocks.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:49:39.479606+00:00