Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Block size following technological growth

From: Gary Mulder <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2015 17:56:23 +0100

On 30 July 2015 at 16:12, Jorge Timón <[email-masked]
> wrote:

> 1) Unlike previous blocksize hardfork proposals, this uses median time
> instead of block.nTime for activation. I like that more but my
> preference is still using height for everything. But that discussion
> is not specific to this proposal, so it's better if we discuss that
> for all of them here:
>
> http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-July/009731.html

Note that a "median" is a special case of a 50% percentile. If you desire
to apply a more stringent criteria you can use the 75th or even 90th
percentile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile

Perhaps if a statistician (i.e. not me) could be found to offer her
services, she could become a resource for helping selecting the most
appropriate statistical algorithms on request (and implemented Integer math
as per Gavin, from memory), considering the consequences of learning
post-fork that a "bad statistical model" was chosen.

e.g. an exponentially weighted moving average is usually much less volatile
and harder to manipulate than a simple moving average, but still can
"respond" to short term drivers.

Regards,
Gary