Published on: 2015-11-15T06:04:10+00:00
A new mailing list called bitcoin-discuss has been created for more free-flowing topics related to Bitcoin governance, policy or other meta-issues. The bitcoin-dev moderation team requests that further discussion on these topics be taken to this forum instead of the current one. A member named Peter R suggests discussing how Bitcoin should be governed in the first place and whether it should evolve from the “bottom up” or from the “top down”. If one’s answer is from the “bottom up,” then the meta-level criteria is very easy: we do what the people want and allow them to weigh the tradeoffs.Regarding the block size limit debate, if one concedes that Bitcoin should be governed from the “bottom up,” then it is already possible to empower each node operator to express his free choice regarding the size of blocks he is willing to accept while simultaneously ensuring that his node tracks consensus. Emin Gün Sirer posed the question of how to evaluate a truly perfect function for block size increase. He asked the community to first agree upon how to evaluate proposals before discussing specific functions. Several meta-level criteria were suggested, including increasing the block size while ensuring that large miners never have an advantage over small miners and increasing block size as much as possible subject to the constraint that 90% of nodes on the network are no more than one minute behind one of the tails of the blockchain 99% of the time. Additionally, the ability to run low-cost fully validating nodes, include additional data into the Bitcoin blockchain, reduce noise in the ledger, and address long-term scalability with well-defined auxiliary protocols to offer high-transaction throughputs were also proposed as important criteria. The discussion highlighted the need to re-evaluate the problem of scalability facing the Bitcoin network and focus on how to deal with the increasing demands on transaction throughput rather than solely on block size increase.The author agrees with the idea of defining a formal set of criteria. Proposals that schedule future increases to the blocksize consensus maximum, or leave it for miners to decide, can't be evaluated without making assumptions about the future. To address this, the author suggests having simulation and benchmarking software that can analyze proposals, give resource consumption benchmark data about average and worst cases, and also give some kind of metric from "mining centralization dynamics simulations." The author believes it would be ideal to have a metric for concrete block sizes, unrelated to the deployment mechanism, proposed activation date, and other details.In response to a suggestion that no user on the network should wait more than an hour to get three confirmations on the blockchain, the author explains that this depends on various factors such as block space demand, the fee paid by the user, local relay and mining policies in the network, the form of the transaction, and even the network topology. There's no consensus rule that can guarantee that all transactions from all users will be included at most three blocks after they are relayed. However, there is a fee estimator that observes the chain and can estimate the market situation to tell you the average number of blocks for a given transaction with a given feerate.The block size debate within the Bitcoin community has sparked a multitude of proposals for future block size increases, with countless alternative functions being suggested. However, instead of discussing specific block size increase functions, the author suggests enunciating what grand goals a truly perfect function would achieve. This meta-question asks what criteria we should look for when evaluating a good proposal, rather than judging individual proposals themselves. Possible meta-goals include increasing block size while ensuring large miners never have an advantage over small miners, increasing block size subject to a constraint on node synchronization, or not increasing block size until a certain date. Defining these meta-criteria before evaluating proposals will help prevent unnecessary proliferation of block size increase proposals. Ultimately, even with meta-criteria in hand, there may be room for disagreement due to uncertainty about the future evolution of network access technologies and node placement.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T16:52:34.466453+00:00