Topic: The blocksize issue: how about time limits? (Read 768 times)

even if you put code in to hard limit a block to be atleast 7 minutes, (or any number you think of, but lets use 7 minutes)

then when the mining farms that can make blocks in 4 minutes will then waste 3 minutes doing nothing.. and then at 6:59 its then a fastest finger first..
this will lead to many blocks being made far before the time as things ramp up and still become a lottery

this would mean that the difficulty does not change as its accounting for the 7th minute.. even when miners are queing up solved blocks even after a couple minutes.. meaning that after a while miners could solve 2,3,4,5, etc blocks before the 7th minute. which means they can manipulate the chain to their advantage and cause issues around security.

instead of a time limit hard coded.. which will affect difficulty, a much easier option would be to change the code from 25btc for an average 10 mins.. to be 6.25btc for ever 2minutes 30 seconds.. that way its still based on solving a complex puzzle that wont lead to difficulty/security issues, and the 21mill limit will still be enforced.

though i do not propose my own suggestion.. its atleast less risky to bitcoin than your time limit code

Your suggestion would be accepted more favorably if you would describe solutions to some obvious problems. One obvious problem that you need to solve is how the network synchronizes time. Another is how the network determines who gets the block reward.

You might also be taken more seriously if you weren't a member of a signature campaign. Being in a signature campaign makes it look like you are posting nonsense just to increase your post count.

I really have no idea why people are entertaining your thread. Thanks for your idea, I guess, but it is absurd.

Bitcoin has a targeted 10 minutes block creation time since its inception. Everything pretty much runs around it. The seignorage of coins, issuance rate & security.

My examples of one hour minimum time and 6 hours maximum time were only examples. Nothing more. I could have wrote 7 and 27 minutes. Then I shall remind the people here that there are blocks with zero transactions, and the network processes them. So there would be no need to make fake transactions. A time limit would also make for a very regular block rate, even though it's not much of a problem.

Anyway, I'm just trying to bring new solutions to the difficult blocksize issue. If this is a bad idea, that's OK with me.

The problem is not about the time limits but rather the data it contains in a single block. Also, I don't think that it could be done or implemented in the protocol or whether it would be viable to apply it in the whole protocol.


This is what I see fit for the blocksize debate. We need a 'flexible' block size rather than a fixed one, though I'm not sure how would it be implemented.

Blocksize raises seems like a good solution, though a temporal one. Then developers will have time to think about more creative or ultimate solutions.

Problem with blocksize is that, according to some, it is very urgent.

What you want to looko for is dynamic blocksize rather than so called timelimits. There's actually a BIP for this. Im not knowledgeable enough to analyze this BIP, but I guess there are some serious problems with it or doubts around its functionality. On paper it sounds great but I would like to know the implications in a real scenario. What are the pros and cons of the dynamic blocksize BIP?

This doesn't make any sense at all.

Time limits would have a massive effect on the bitcoin release profile and block generation. The avarage of 10 minutes is used to base the difficulty on (should always remain constant on avarage, else adjust diff). Longer block times would severely reduce the coin emission and difficulty, which is not desirable.

So my initial assumption was correct. This was a bad idea and would not work. The sizes of those blocks are not directly related to the amount of time that it takes to mine them. Basically anyone could spam to create a large enough block that would damage the network.

The size limit has nothing to do time between blocks. The time between blocks is determined by the difficulty and nothing more.

the difficulty is important as it makes it harder for someone to manipulate transactions because of the hashes needed to create a block.
but by setting a 1 block per hour limit, will make the difficulty drop. because bitcoin is SUPPOSE to be 10 minutes a block not 60mins per block..

...after months of difficulty drops because there is a change from 6/hour to 1/hour.. many people will think that they can mine using just 1ghash instead of 1petahash..

which is kind of true..

but they are not mining for an hour to get a difficult puzzle solved.. they are mining random/meaningless crap, and then when it hits the hour acceptance time.. it is then 'fastest finger first' lottery. unrelated to a difficult puzzle

the end result is that the difficulty is so low that even if 1 million people just had a 1ghash miner.. only one miner wins per hour.
and the hash protecting that block would be soo low on nonce that it will not be as secure..
and because only 1 person who is only mining using a 1ghash miner wins.. costing him $1 in electric. he will sell the 25 coins for $2, making bitcoin worth less than 10c each.

and then because he has to wait a million hours he and many others wont wait around on meaningless hashing. as its no longer a meaningful puzzle but a hourly lottery that anyone can win..

so after months the hype will die down. there will only be like ~12 miners. just fooling around to make 2 blocks a day with the hope that they could sell the coins for a total of $50, for a days wage.

and with as i said before a crap difficulty.. mining farms will then start making their own changes(forks) to the blockchain to fake transactions into their own pockets and then attempt to manipulate it so that they get rich..

which in short is not protecting the network and not making fast transactions and not a fair way to mine.. no one benefits. it would kill the price, it will kill customer waiting times.. totally ruining bitcoin.

I am no Bitcoin expert,
but creating a minimum time limit (for example 5 mins) and a max (for example 2 hours),
do not (I believe) have any effect on the blocksize debate.

The issue is not whether blocks are too slow or too fast, but is how much data (or max data amount) should each block have.
Even if there was an increase in how much a block can hold, there would still be a limit, so blocks do not get hammered to multi-gig sizes.

But I may not really understand what you are trying to say.

There is such a thing as Bitcoin's emission schedule and no, this cannot be "adjusted".

Easy. I explain.

We remove the 1MB size limit, and replace it a first limit stating that a block cannot be completed in less than one hour, and another limit saying that a block cannot take more than 6 hours to complete. The software would not be allowed to run after that time limit, it would be terminated, and the result would be a new block.

As computing power increases, size of blocks would gradually increase.

What are you even talking about? There is no way to remove all limits. Imposing a different limit instead of the current one is actually not a solution at all (i.e. you do not remove limits by introducing another one). It is like you take a piece of code written using "if" and write it out using "do while". The end effect is still the same, you still have the code doing the same thing (or another limitation of similar purpose in our case).

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However, I'd first like you to explain what you exactly think here and how you picture this working.

There are still dark shadows over BTC because of the current small size of blocks. I wonder if it could be possible to remove all size limit, and have time limits instead. There shall be a minimum time, and a maximum execution time, to make a block. Then blocksize would rise with computing power.

I'm sure it can be done, but I wonder if would be smart. Open to all comments.