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

[praxeology_guy <praxeology_guy@protonmail.com>]

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I think at least the three following things have to be done before the block size can be increased by any significant amount:
1. A network protocol defined UTXO snapshot format be defined, UTXO snapshots being created automatically in a deterministic periodic and low-cost fashion. Ability to synchronize starting from such a UTXO snapshot as requested by a user.
2. SPV support from a pruned node that has the latest UTXO snapshot. Probably requires committing the UTXO snapshot hash to the block.
3. Given the above fixes the problem of needing full block chain history storage, and people are comfortable with such a security model, a good portion of the network can switch to this security model, and still satisfy our desire for the system to be sufficiently distributed. This requires lots of testing.
4. More current studies on the effect of increasing the block size on synchronizing node drop out due to other reasons such as network bandwidth, memory, and CPU usage.

Without doing the above, scheduling to increasing the block size would be wreckless.

Cheers,
Praxeology Guy

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Hard fork proposal from last week's meeting
Local Time: March 29, 2017 2:10 PM
UTC Time: March 29, 2017 7:10 PM
From: bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
To: Martin Lízner <martin.lizner@gmail.com>, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>

In order for any blocksize increase to be agreed upon, more consensus is needed. The proportion of users believing no blocksize increases are needed is larger than the hardfork target core wants(95% consensus). The proportion of users believing in microtransactions for all is also larger than 5%, and both of those groups may be larger than 10% respectively. I don't think either the Big-blocks faction nor the low-node-costs faction have even a simple majority of support. Getting consensus is going to be a big mess, but it is critical that it is done.

On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 12:49 AM, Martin Lízner via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

If there should be a hard-fork, Core team should author the code. Other dev teams have marginal support among all BTC users.

Im tending to believe, that HF is necessary evil now. But lets do it in conservative approach:
- Fix historical BTC issues, improve code
- Plan HF activation date well ahead - 12 months+
- Allow increasing block size on year-year basis as Luke suggested
- Compromise with miners on initial block size bump (e.g. 2MB)
- SegWit

Martin Lizner

On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 6:59 PM, Wang Chun via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@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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