From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from sog-mx-1.v43.ch3.sourceforge.com ([172.29.43.191] helo=mx.sourceforge.net) by sfs-ml-2.v29.ch3.sourceforge.com with esmtp (Exim 4.76) (envelope-from ) id 1UFq2F-0002pd-J0 for bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net; Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:04:19 +0000 X-ACL-Warn: Received: from zinan.dashjr.org ([173.242.112.54]) by sog-mx-1.v43.ch3.sourceforge.com with esmtp (Exim 4.76) id 1UFq2E-00080J-4y for bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net; Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:04:19 +0000 Received: from ishibashi.localnet (unknown [173.170.142.26]) (Authenticated sender: luke-jr) by zinan.dashjr.org (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 85DEC27A2968; Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:04:12 +0000 (UTC) From: "Luke-Jr" To: Mark Friedenbach Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:04:08 +0000 User-Agent: KMail/1.13.7 (Linux/3.7.3-gentoo; KDE/4.9.5; x86_64; ; ) References: <201303131256.30144.luke@dashjr.org> In-Reply-To: X-PGP-Key-Fingerprint: E463 A93F 5F31 17EE DE6C 7316 BD02 9424 21F4 889F X-PGP-Key-ID: BD02942421F4889F X-PGP-Keyserver: hkp://pgp.mit.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <201303131804.09339.luke@dashjr.org> Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="iso-8859-15" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: -2.4 (--) X-Spam-Report: Spam Filtering performed by mx.sourceforge.net. See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details. -2.4 RP_MATCHES_RCVD Envelope sender domain matches handover relay domain X-Headers-End: 1UFq2E-00080J-4y Cc: "bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net" Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas X-BeenThere: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.9 Precedence: list List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:04:19 -0000 On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 5:41:29 PM you wrote: > I'm not sure I understand the need for hard forks. We can get through this > crisis by mining pool collusion to prevent forking blocks until there is > widespread adoption of patched clients. Anything requiring widespread adoption of patched clients *is by definition* a hard fork. > Proposal: > > 1) Patch the pre-0.8 branches to support an increased lock count, whatever > number is required to make sure that this problem never shows up again at > the current block size (I defer to Luke-Jr and gmaxwell's numbers on this). This is a hard fork. The only way to avoid a hard fork is to apply the existing lock limit to all clients forever. That would be fine, except that pre-0.8 clients cannot reorg N blocks without dividing that limit by (N * 2) + 1; that leaves us with the limit of around 1000 locks per block on average. Each transaction uses at least 3 locks on average (many times more). So about 300 transactions per block. This is a much smaller limit than the 1 MB we've been assuming is the bottleneck so far, and the need to increase it is much more urgent - as Pieter noted on IRC, we are probably already using more than that even ignoring DP spam. The only reason pre-0.8 clients have survived as well as they have thus far is because the blockchain has managed to avoid very deep reorgs. Luke