Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements

From: Tier Nolan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 20:47:52 +0100

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 5:37 PM, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:

> The soft-limit is there miners themselves produce smaller blocks; the
> soft-limit does not prevent other miners from producing larger blocks.
>

I wonder if having a "miner" flag would be good for the network.

Clients for general users and merchants would have a less strict rule than
the rule for miners.  Miners who don't set their miners flag might get
orphaned off the chain.

For example, the limits could be setup as follows.

Clients: 20MB
Miners: 4MB

When in "miner mode", the client would reject 4MB blocks and wouldn't build
on them.  The reference client might even track the miner and the non-miner
chain tip.

Miners would refuse to build on 5MB blocks, but merchants and general users
would accept them.

This allows the miners to soft fork the limit at some point in the future.
If 75% of miners decided to up the limit to 8MB, then all merchants and the
general users would accept the new blocks.  It could follow the standard
soft fork rules.

This is a more general version of the system where miners are allowed to
vote on the block size (subject to a higher limit).

A similar system is where clients track all header trees.  Your wallet
could warn you that there is an invalid tree that has > 75% of the hashing
power and you might want to upgrade.