Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Draft BIP : fixed-schedule block size increase

From: Gareth Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2015 23:50:41 +1000

On 24 June 2015 1:49:51 PM AEST, Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]> wrote:
>Miners can collude today to lower the block size limit.

Of course they can. What, then, is the need for BIP100's hard-limit voting mechanism?

You only need consensus rules to enforce block size limits if you're enforcing them _against_ miners. Which may be a perfectly valid thing to do (if your threat model includes, for example, the possibility that large miners deliberately create large blocks to gain an advantage over small miners.) But BIP100 doesn't address that anyway. 

Wouldn't it be safer for consensus to get behind Gavin's simpler 8MB->8GB hard-limit growth curve*, and then encourage miners to enforce a soft limit below that, agreed through a voting mechanism? The later can be implemented at any time without consensus changes -- nobody can prevent miners from coordinating the max block size they'll build on anyway.

* but with a safer "supermajority" than 75% please :)
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