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From: Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt.me>
To: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Date: Wed, 06 May 2015 22:12:14 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <554A91BE.6060105@bluematt.me> (raw)

Recently there has been a flurry of posts by Gavin at
http://gavinandresen.svbtle.com/ which advocate strongly for increasing
the maximum block size. However, there hasnt been any discussion on this
mailing list in several years as far as I can tell.

Block size is a question to which there is no answer, but which
certainly has a LOT of technical tradeoffs to consider. I know a lot of
people here have varying levels of strong or very strong opinions about
this, and the fact that it is not being discussed in a technical
community publicly anywhere is rather disappointing.

So, at the risk of starting a flamewar, I'll provide a little bait to
get some responses and hope the discussion opens up into an honest
comparison of the tradeoffs here. Certainly a consensus in this kind of
technical community should be a basic requirement for any serious
commitment to blocksize increase.

Personally, I'm rather strongly against any commitment to a block size
increase in the near future. Long-term incentive compatibility requires
that there be some fee pressure, and that blocks be relatively
consistently full or very nearly full. What we see today are
transactions enjoying next-block confirmations with nearly zero pressure
to include any fee at all (though many do because it makes wallet code
simpler).

This allows the well-funded Bitcoin ecosystem to continue building
systems which rely on transactions moving quickly into blocks while
pretending these systems scale. Thus, instead of working on technologies
which bring Bitcoin's trustlessness to systems which scale beyond a
blockchain's necessarily slow and (compared to updating numbers in a
database) expensive settlement, the ecosystem as a whole continues to
focus on building centralized platforms and advocate for changes to
Bitcoin which allow them to maintain the status quo[1].

Matt

[1] https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/595741967759335426



             reply	other threads:[~2015-05-06 22:12 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 116+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2015-05-06 22:12 Matt Corallo [this message]
2015-05-06 22:30 ` [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase slush
2015-05-06 23:06   ` Eric Lombrozo
2015-05-06 22:44 ` Tier Nolan
2015-05-06 23:12   ` Matt Corallo
2015-05-06 23:33     ` Tier Nolan
2015-05-06 23:41       ` Matt Corallo
2015-05-07  2:16         ` Peter Todd
2015-05-06 23:11 ` Matt Whitlock
2015-05-06 23:13   ` Matt Corallo
2015-05-07  0:00 ` Tom Harding
2015-05-07  0:07 ` Bryan Bishop
2015-05-07  0:37 ` Gregory Maxwell
2015-05-07  1:49 ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07  3:03   ` Justus Ranvier
2015-05-08 11:02   ` Thomas Zander
2015-05-08 20:17     ` Aaron Voisine
2015-05-07  3:47 ` Pieter Wuille
2015-05-07  9:25 ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 10:12   ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 10:42   ` Btc Drak
2015-05-07 10:52   ` Jorge Timón
2015-05-07 11:15     ` Andrew
2015-05-07 11:29     ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 12:26       ` Jorge Timón
2015-05-07 14:05         ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 14:18           ` Bryan Bishop
2015-05-07 14:22           ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 14:40           ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 14:52           ` Gavin Andresen
2015-05-07 14:56             ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 15:04             ` Alex Morcos
2015-05-07 15:09               ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-07 15:12               ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 15:17                 ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-07 15:29                   ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 15:35                     ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-07 16:18                       ` Justus Ranvier
2015-05-07 16:21                     ` Jorge Timón
2015-05-07 17:29                       ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 19:37                       ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 19:44                         ` Jérémie Dubois-Lacoste
2015-05-07 20:20                         ` Jérémie Dubois-Lacoste
2015-05-07 15:58             ` Matthew Mitchell
2015-05-07 16:47               ` Matthew Mitchell
2015-05-07 17:26             ` Matt Corallo
     [not found]               ` <CABsx9T2vAQyZODRE9apu0R1n=LybssQcuTYD7P3mAQH_Fv6QCQ@mail.gmail.com>
2015-05-07 17:40                 ` [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: " Gavin Andresen
2015-05-07 17:43               ` [Bitcoin-development] " Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 18:03                 ` Btc Drak
2015-05-07 18:06                   ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 18:21                     ` Ross Nicoll
2015-05-07 18:40                     ` Gavin Costin
2015-05-07 18:46                       ` Btc Drak
2015-05-07 19:31                         ` Bernard Rihn
2015-05-07 19:31                     ` Alan Reiner
2015-05-07 19:54                       ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-07 19:59                         ` Justus Ranvier
2015-05-08  1:40                         ` Tom Harding
2015-05-08  2:09                           ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-08  5:13                             ` Tom Harding
2015-05-08  9:43                               ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-08 15:23                               ` Alan Reiner
2015-05-08 14:59                         ` Alan Reiner
2015-05-08 15:49                           ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-13 10:37                             ` Oliver Egginger
2015-05-13 11:25                               ` Angel Leon
2015-05-08 17:17                           ` Andrew
2015-05-08 17:51                             ` Alan Reiner
     [not found]                               ` <CADZB0_bK+YsK8sN-di2pynvjsq5VjSvnEu0-cCGhPqFunyVm7Q@mail.gmail.com>
2015-05-09 12:02                                 ` Andrew
2015-05-09 12:53                                   ` Justus Ranvier
2015-05-09 18:33                                     ` Andrew
2015-05-08  1:51                       ` Joel Joonatan Kaartinen
2015-05-08  3:41                       ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 18:38                   ` Chris Wardell
2015-05-07 18:55                     ` Alex Mizrahi
2015-05-07 18:59                     ` Ross Nicoll
2015-05-07 19:03                 ` Matt Corallo
2015-05-07 19:13                   ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-07 19:34                   ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 21:29                     ` Matt Corallo
2015-05-07 23:05                       ` 21E14
2015-05-07 15:33           ` Jorge Timón
2015-05-07 16:11             ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 16:47               ` Jorge Timón
2015-05-07 16:59                 ` Gavin Andresen
2015-05-07 17:42                   ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 18:05                   ` Jorge Timón
2015-05-07 19:57               ` Btc Drak
2015-05-07 15:39           ` Btc Drak
2015-05-07 13:02       ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 19:14       ` Matt Corallo
2015-05-07 11:55     ` Dave Hudson
2015-05-07 13:40       ` Jorge Timón
2015-05-08  4:46         ` Tom Harding
2015-05-07 14:04   ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-07 14:32     ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 14:38     ` Justus Ranvier
2015-05-07 14:49       ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 15:13         ` Justus Ranvier
2015-05-07 15:25           ` Peter Todd
2015-05-07 15:04       ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-07 15:16         ` Justus Ranvier
2015-05-07 15:27           ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-07 15:33             ` Justus Ranvier
2015-05-07 15:47               ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-07 15:50                 ` Justus Ranvier
2015-05-07 11:20 ` Wladimir J. van der Laan
2015-05-07 11:30   ` Eric Lombrozo
2015-05-07 15:56 ` Jeff Garzik
2015-05-07 16:13   ` Mike Hearn
2015-05-07 16:54 John Bodeen
2015-05-08 20:38 Raystonn .
2015-05-08 20:40 ` Mark Friedenbach
2015-05-08 20:51 Raystonn
2015-05-08 20:55 ` Mark Friedenbach
2015-05-08 21:01 Raystonn

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