Author: Alex Morcos 2015-10-05 18:45:57
Published on: 2015-10-05T18:45:57+00:00
Bitcoin developer Alex Morcos has proposed a significant reduction in the current policy limits on unconfirmed transaction chains. The existing limits are 100 transactions and 900 kilobytes of total size for ancestor packages and 1000 transactions and 2500 kilobytes of total size for descendant packages, but Morcos believes these limits are overly generous and lead to mempool clogging or relay fee boosting attacks. The new proposed limits are 25 transactions and 100 kilobytes of total size for both ancestor and descendant packages. Based on historical transaction data, the most restrictive of these limits is the 25 transaction count on descendant packages, which would have affected 5.8% of transactions from April and May this year. These are policy limits that affect transactions dependent on other unconfirmed transactions only, they are not a change to consensus rules and do not affect how many chained transactions a valid block may contain. Furthermore, any transaction that was unable to be relayed due to these limits needs only wait for some of its unconfirmed ancestors to be included in a block, after which it can be successfully broadcast. These limits are command line arguments that can easily be changed on an individual node basis in Bitcoin Core.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T19:32:45.008618+00:00