Topic: It's that time again - please ask your pool operator about their block policies (Read 1532 times)

If we ignore moores law then we can presume failure is inevitable for multiple reasons, why even bother.  I'd rather assume I'll have pure fibre plugged into my mobo at some point

Moved here and stickied this to help it along.

sounds like the perfect solution

That day will obviously never come if nobody can confirm their transactions in a reasonable amount of time.

That's like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because your not getting wet.  


The day will come when the block chain is so large and its acceptance so wide spread that just maintaining a full copy of it will max out all consumer level internet connections. 
Postponing that day for as long as possible is the single most important Bitcoin related issue. 

Probably nobody knows any explanation. A lot of things in Bitcoin are still holdovers from when Satoshi wrote things just by himself, and he often failed to explain the reasons behind what he did. Probably it was yet another anti-spam system. In theory if we set the soft limit to 1mb and then all the space got filled up with useless spammy transactions it could be easily lowered again, but trying to find the balance between "good" and "bad" transactions is difficult. Especially because when we don't find a block for a while the good transactions pile up.

At the moment we don't seem to have much of a spam problem, so it makes sense to open up the throttle. Potentially, a soft limit phrased in terms of transactions per minute would make more sense than one based on a fixed block size.

It's not a big deal for me at this time.  But at some point it will be.

I still have not seen an explanation why an artificial soft limit was established in the first place.

Larger than 243kb (which is the default if you don't change the settings). If you flip through the blocks you can find ones that are larger. Fortunately we're not under too much traffic pressure at the moment, things slackened off a bit since March/April, so the only time blocks need to be larger than the soft limit is when one wasn't found for a while. But it sucks to wait, doesn't it?

And what are the size of blocks that "some pools" are creating now for some time?

Some months ago we made the collective decision to expire 0.7.x era Bitcoin nodes after around mid May, because they weren't reliably able to handle complex blocks. This date has come and gone, but there are still mining pools that are generating 250kb blocks, i.e. they have not modified the default Bitcoin settings.

This means that if there's a long gap between finding blocks, many transactions that could confirm don't because the block is full. It makes Bitcoin slower and more annoying to use. It's time to try again.

Pool ops - please advertise your block size policy widely and consider if the 250kb soft limit is appropriate.

Miners - please ask your pool ops to document their size policies and think about which ones you prefer.

I would recommend that the soft limit be removed (set to 1mb, same as the hard limit) to ensure that even when there are 40-60 minute gaps between blocks most transactions will confirm when one is found.

The last time we decided to do this, it caused problems because not all nodes had upgraded to the more reliable LevelDB version and the old code turned out to contain unexpected bugs that led to a sudden hard fork. However since then nearly all nodes are upgraded to the latest code, and some pools have been creating larger blocks for some time already (check blockchain.info). There have been no repeats of any issues.