Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

From: Steven Pine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 May 2015 14:25:17 -0400

My understanding, which is very likely wrong in one way or another, is
transaction size and block size are two slightly different things but
perhaps it's so negligible that block size is a fine stand-in for total
transaction throughput.

Potentially Doubling the block size everyday is frankly imprudent. The
logarithmic increases in difficulty, which were often closer to 10% or 20%
every 2016 blocks was and is plenty fast, potentially changing blocksize by
twice daily is the mentality I would expect from a startup with the move
fast break things motto.

Infrastructure takes time, not everyone wants to run a node on a virtual
amazon instance, provisioning additional hard drive and bandwidth can't
happen overnight and trying to plan when block size from one week to the
next is a total mystery would be extremely difficult.

Anyone who has spent time examining the mining difficulty increases and
trajectory knows future planning is very very hard, allowing block size to
double daily would make it impossible.

Perhaps a middle way would be 300%  increase every 2016 blocks, that will
scale to 20mbs within a  month or two

The problem is logarithmic increases seem slow until they seem fast. If the
network begins to grow and block size hits 20, then the next day 40, 80...
Small nodes could get swamped within a week or less.

As for your point about Christmas, Bitcoin is a global network, Christmas,
while widely celebrated, isn't the only holiday, and planning around
American buying habits seems short sighted and no different from developers
trying to choose what the right fee pressure is.

On May 28, 2015 1:22 PM, "Gavin Andresen" <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Steven Pine <[email-masked]>
wrote:
>>
>> I would support a dynamic block size increase as outlined. I have a few
questions though.
>>
>> Is scaling by average block size the best and easiest method, why not
scale by transactions confirmed instead? Anyone can write and relay a
transaction, and those are what we want to scale for, why not measure it
directly?
>
>
> What do you mean? Transactions aren't confirmed until they're in a
block...
>
>>
>> I would prefer changes every 2016 blocks, it is a well known change and
a reasonable time period for planning on changes. Two weeks is plenty fast,
especially at a 50% rate increase, in a few months the block size could be
dramatically larger.
>
>
> What type of planning do you imagine is necessary?
>
> And have you looked at transaction volumes for credit-card payment
networks around Christmas?
>
>>
>> Daily change to size seems confusing especially considering that max
block size will be dipping up and down. Also if something breaks trying to
fix it in a day seems problematic. The hard fork database size difference
error comes to mind. Finally daily 50% increases could quickly crowd out
smaller nodes if changes happen too quickly to adapt for.
>
> The bottleneck is transaction volume; blocks won't get bigger unless
there are fee-paying transactions around to pay them. What scenario are you
imagining where transaction volume increases by 50% a day for a sustained
period of time?
> --
> --
> Gavin Andresen