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

From: Matt Corallo <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2017 17:13:09 +0000

Not sure what "last week's meeting" is in reference to?

Agreed that the hard fork should be well-prepared, but I think its
dangerous to think that a hard fork as agreed upon would be a simple
relaxation of the block size. For example, Johnson Lau's previous
proposal, Spoonnet, which I think is probably one of the better ones,
would be incompatible with these rules.

I, of course, worry about what happens if we cannot come to consensus on
a number to soft fork down to, potentially significantly risking miner
profits (and, thus, the security of Bitcoin) if a group is able to keep
things "at the status quo". That said, for that to be alleviated we
could simply do something based on historical transaction growth (which
is somewhat linear, with a few inflection points), but that number ends
up being super low (eg somewhere around 2MB at the next halving, which
SegWit itself already provides :/.

We could, of course, focus on designing a hard fork's activation and
technical details, with a very large block size increase in it (ie
closer to 4/6MB at the next halving or so, something we at least could
be confident we could develop software for), with intention to soft fork
it back down if miner profits are suffering.

Matt

On 03/28/17 16:59, Wang Chun via bitcoin-dev 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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