Time to roll out bigger blocks
I was planning to submit a pull request to the 0.11 release of Bitcoin Core that will allow miners to create blocks bigger than one megabyte, starting a little less than a year from now. But this process of peer review turned up a technical issue that needs to get addressed, and I don’t think it can be fixed in time for the first 0.11 release.
I will be writing a series of blog posts, each addressing one argument against raising the maximum block size, or against scheduling a raise right now. These are the objections I plan on writing about; please send me an email (gavinandresen@gmail.com) if I am missing any arguments for why one megabyte is the best size for Bitcoin blocks over the next few years.
- “There is no need to raise the maximum block size right now, the average block size is only about 400,000 bytes.”
- “There is no need to raise the maximum block size because the Lightning Network / Sidechains / ChainDB / Treechains / Factom will solve the scaling problem.”
- “The network will be more secure with one megabyte blocks, because there will be more competition among transactions, and, therefore, higher transaction fees for miners.”
- “More transactions means more bandwidth and CPU and storage cost, and more cost means increased centralization because fewer people will be able to afford that cost.”
- “More transactions makes it more difficult to keep Bitcoin activity private from oppressive governments.”
- “More transactions means more memory for the UTXO database”
- “Bigger blocks gives bigger miners an economic advantage”
- “Larger-than-one-megabyte blocks have had insufficient testing and/or insufficient research into economic implications and/or insufficient security review of the risks versus benefits.”
- “When the block reward goes away….”
- “I agree the max block limit must change, but why not do it THIS way instead?”
- “Any change that requires a hard fork will open up Pandora’s Box and destroy the confidence people have in the stability of Bitcoin; if the one megabyte maximum block size limit can be changed, why not the total number of bitcoins issued?”
If I am being unfair in how I am stating any of the above objections, please let me know via email.