I’m a game developer. I write time critical code for a living and have to deal with memory, CPU, GPU and I/O budgets on a daily basis. These budgets are based on what we call a minimum specification (of hardware); min spec for short. In most cases the min spec is based on entry model machines that are available during launch, and will give the user an enjoyable experience when playing our games. Obviously, we can turn on a number of bells and whistles for people with faster machines, but that’s not the point of this mail.

The point is, can we define a min spec for Bitcoin Core? The number one reason for this is: if you know how your changes affect your available budgets, then the risk of breaking something due to capacity problems is reduced to practically zero.