[bitcoin-dev] Hard fork proposal from last week's meeting

[Juan Garavaglia]

Alphonse,

In my opinion if 1MB limit was ok in 2010, 8MB limit is ok on 2016 and 32MB limit valid in next halving, from network, storage and CPU perspective or 1MB was too high in 2010 what is possible or 1MB is to low today.

If is unsafe or impossible to raise the blocksize is a different topic.

Regards

Juan


From: bitcoin-dev-bounces at lists.linuxfoundation.org [mailto:bitcoin-dev-bounces at lists.linuxfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Alphonse Pace via bitcoin-dev
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2017 2:24 PM
To: Wang Chun <1240902 at gmail.com>; Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Hard fork proposal from last week's meeting

What meeting are you referring to?  Who were the participants?

Removing the limit but relying on the p2p protocol is not really a true 32MiB limit, but a limit of whatever transport methods provide.  This can lead to differing consensus if alternative layers for relaying are used.  What you seem to be asking for is an unbound block size (or at least determined by whatever miners produce).  This has the possibility (and even likelihood) of removing many participants from the network, including many small miners.

32MB in less than 3 years also appears to be far beyond limits of safety which are known to exist far sooner, and we cannot expect hardware and networking layers to improve by those amounts in that time.

It also seems like it would be much better to wait until SegWit activates in order to truly measure the effects on the network from this increased capacity before committing to any additional increases.

-Alphonse



On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 11:59 AM, Wang Chun via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org<mailto:bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org>> wrote:
I've proposed this hard fork approach last year in Hong Kong Consensus
but immediately rejected by coredevs at that meeting, after more than
one year it seems that lots of people haven't heard of it. So I would
post this here again for comment.

The basic idea is, as many of us agree, hard fork is risky and should
be well prepared. We need a long time to deploy it.

Despite spam tx on the network, the block capacity is approaching its
limit, and we must think ahead. Shall we code a patch right now, to
remove the block size limit of 1MB, but not activate it until far in
the future. I would propose to remove the 1MB limit at the next block
halving in spring 2020, only limit the block size to 32MiB which is
the maximum size the current p2p protocol allows. This patch must be
in the immediate next release of Bitcoin Core.

With this patch in core's next release, Bitcoin works just as before,
no fork will ever occur, until spring 2020. But everyone knows there
will be a fork scheduled. Third party services, libraries, wallets and
exchanges will have enough time to prepare for it over the next three
years.

We don't yet have an agreement on how to increase the block size
limit. There have been many proposals over the past years, like
BIP100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 148, 248, BU, and so
on. These hard fork proposals, with this patch already in Core's
release, they all become soft fork. We'll have enough time to discuss
all these proposals and decide which one to go. Take an example, if we
choose to fork to only 2MB, since 32MiB already scheduled, reduce it
from 32MiB to 2MB will be a soft fork.

Anyway, we must code something right now, before it becomes too late.
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