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

From: Mike Hearn <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 May 2015 13:57:42 +0200

>
> If the plan is a fix once and for all, then that should be changed too.
> It could be set so that it is at least some multiple of the max block size
> allowed.
>

Well, but RAM is not infinite :-) Effectively what these caps are doing is
setting the minimum hardware requirements for running a Bitcoin node.

That's OK by me - I don't think we are actually going to exhaust the
hardware abilities of any reasonable computer any time soon, but still,
having the software recognise the finite nature of a computing machine
doesn't seem unwise.

> That system can send a block of any size.  It would require a change to
> the processing of any merkleblocks received.
>

Not "any" size because, again, the remote node must buffer things up and
have the transaction data actually in memory in order to digest it. But a
much larger size, yes.

However, that's a bigger change.