Author: Erik Aronesty 2017-05-30 15:51:17
Published on: 2017-05-30T15:51:17+00:00
The current situation in the Bitcoin community involves multiple proposals and potential hard forks. The xkcd comic "Standards" illustrates the problem with having too many competing standards. One potential fork, a rapid 2MB+Segwit hard fork coin, has the potential to fragment the network if miners and exchanges collude to enact it and call it "Bitcoin" on major exchanges. However, if this fork fails to contain an ASICBOOST defense, it shows that Core has failed to appropriately respond to the CVE security vulnerability in time. In response, a swift release of BIP148 in Core seems necessary to defend against these attacks. A recent proposal by LukeJr regarding a 2MB block size hardfork may also become controversial. If Legacy Bitcoin transactions are given the witness discount and a block size limit of 2MB is imposed, it may nullify the expected linear increase in block size when Base Size is increased to 2000000 bytes and Total Weight is increased to 8000000 bytes. This could result in normal usage producing only ~2 or 2.1MB blocks, instead of the expected ~4 or 4.2MB blocks. The author of the email thread, Oliver Petruzel, is seeking a good answer to explain this unexpected outcome to his colleagues.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T01:26:02.223920+00:00