After proposing a fork to increase Bitcoin’s block size to 20 MB, Bitcoin Foundation Chief Scientist Gavin Andresen today published a blogpost explaining “why increasing the max block size is urgent”.
In this short article, Andresen argued on the need to limit the maximum block size to 1 MB. The opinion is derived from a data that reveals that, even with the limited 1 MB size, the Bitcoin blocks handle only 30-40% of transactions each day. “Blocks aren’t full yet,” the notion says, “so we don’t have to do anything (yet).”
Gavin Andresen PortraitA slightly aggressive version of this opinion was put up by one of the GitHub users yesterday, who attacked Andresen verbally upon the latter’s introduction of a forked Bitcoin code. His comments read:
“Seriously Gavin, who do you think you are? Stop parading around the globe trying to dupe everyone into accepting this change. Do you seriously think you have the authority to take away my (and every other current holder of bitcoin’s) rightfully deserved privilege of getting a transaction in before others? What makes you think I want to or have the means to purchase more storage space and processing power to run my full node? What makes you think everyone has the bandwidth to handle this update? You’re losing any shred of credibility you once had by pursuing this nonsense.”
In his defense, the Bitcoin Core Developer mentioned a scenario where the average per day transactions are leveling up, and are subsequently congesting the Bitcoin network. He called it a “mismatch between when transactions are created and when blocks are found” once the 1 MB limit is crossed.
“The mismatch between the steady submission of transactions to the network and the random Poisson distribution of found blocks means we will never have blocks that are 100% full all of the time,” Andresen noted. “Sometimes miners will find a lot of blocks in a row, clearing out the queue of waiting transactions.”
But in case miners fail to find the blocks, he added, the queue of pending transactions will grow and will feed on the memory of every full node. Full nodes, on the other hand, will push the pending transactions out of the queue, making confirmation less reliable than it is today. It will simply result into an over-saturated network, forcing users to rely on side chains.
You can read this journal to know more about the Bitcoin Transaction processing. You may also leave us your comments on whether you support Gavin’s theory or not.
In this short article, Andresen argued on the need to limit the maximum block size to 1 MB. The opinion is derived from a data that reveals that, even with the limited 1 MB size, the Bitcoin blocks handle only 30-40% of transactions each day. […]