Author: Matthew Mitchell 2012-09-13 14:05:29
Published on: 2012-09-13T14:05:29+00:00
In an email thread from September 13th, 2012, Mike Hearn expresses disagreement with Gregory on various points related to Bitcoin. While he thinks that Matt's proposed change is reasonable, he believes it has minimal impact compared to other things and that something more complex would not be feasible. Instead, he believes that Bloom filtering is much more important. Gregory argues that it's only necessary to request the transactions one does not already have, as most of them should already be obtained. However, Mike's proposal allows for this and is considered to be better because it makes use of the merkle tree structure with minor additions that are simple to implement. He suggests that creating an algorithm to determine the best level of segmentation is not required to comply with the protocol. Regarding the concern that people may set the difficulty to zero, Mike argues that incentivizing miners and maintaining stronger security should be enough motivation. The higher the difficulty, the more fees there are for miners to collect, and the more people use Bitcoin, the greater its worth. Mike concludes by stating that if the proposed changes are so controversial that they create a split in the market, eventually people will move towards one or the other, similar to format wars such as VHS vs Betamax and Blu-ray vs HD-DVD.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T07:10:21.244822+00:00