Topic: The MAX_BLOCK_SIZE fork (Read 35619 times)

This rule would apply to blocks until they are 1 deep, right? Do you envision no check-time or size rule for blocks that are built on? Or a different much more generous rule?

I think this is exactly the right thing to do.

There is still the question of what the default behavior should be. Here is a proposal:

Ignore blocks that take your node longer than N seconds to verify.

I'd propose that N be:  60 seconds if you are catching up with the blockchain.  5 seconds if you are all caught-up.  But allow miners/merchants/users to easily change those defaults.

Rationale: we should use time-to-verify as the metric, because everything revolves around the 10-minutes-per-block constant.

Time-to-verify has the nice property of scaling as hardware gets more powerful. Miners will want to create blocks that take a reasonable amount of time to propagate through the network and verify, and will have to weigh "add more transactions to blocks" versus "if I add too many, my block will be ignored by more than half the network."

Time-to-verify also has the nice property of incentivizing miners to broadcast transactions instead of 'hoarding' them, because transactions that are broadcast before they are in a block make the block faster to verify (because of the signature cache). That is good for lots of reasons (early detection of potential double-spends and spreading out the verification work over time so there isn't a blizzard of CPU work that needs to be done every time a block is found, for example).

I believe it is good to have possible future change in protocol, since no one can predict future with today's environment. But then some kind of consensus based voting/poll mechanism should become a practice

Yes, they are. This is what being a developer means in this context: that you are a servant. A slave, if you prefer that terminology. One who obeys. An inferior. A steward. Nobody, politically speaking. I'm running out of alternative ways to put this, but I would hope you get the idea.

I agree with those who push for a formal specification for the protocol instead of letting the reference implementation be the protocol. It is hard work, but the way to go IMO.

Everybody understands what replacing 1MB with 10MB means, it's no rocket science.

How about no? Making it 10MB would just necessitate another hard fork in the future. We should have as few hard forks as possible, so make it dynamic somehow so that that part of the protocol need not ever be changed again.

Yes please, 10 megabyte per block is the right answer.

Certainly from a software engineering point of view, medium-term scalability is a trivial problem. An extra zero in the line would be fine for a good while.

So... what happens then?  What is the method for implementing a hard fork?  No precedent, right?  Do we have a meeting?  With who?  Vote?  Ultimately it’s the miners that get to decide, right?  What if the miners like the 1MB limit, because they think the imposed scarcity of blockchain space will lead to higher transaction fees, and more bitcoin for them?  How do we decide on these things when nobody is really in charge?  Is a fork really going to happen at all?

It's not the miners who make the call in the max_block_size issue, right?  I mean, all the miners could gang up and say: "we're not going to process blocks with more than 2 transactions," if they wanted too.  It's the validating nodes that make the call as far as what will be a valid block.  If all the nodes ganged up, they could change the limit as well. 

Have only read OP post, but are you saying that if everyone in the world tried to do a transaction right now that it would take 30+ years to verify them all (assuming the hardware and software remained unchanged)? Wow! 

Maybe look at basing transaction fees on the number of locks a transaction uses is another angle for a solution? Loosely specifying "1MB" as the block limit is in fact abstracting a data size away from the actual physical configuration of how that data is stored/accessed which is what actually defines the total transaction cost, includes CPU cycles, disk read/writes and storage.

Excellent reasoning... If bitcoin was about locking databases that would be just the very kind of quantification that should go into its specification.

Unfortunately, bitcoin is a little more about attaining, storing and transmitting a proven state of consensus than about controlling how many entities can access how many bits of it, and which bits, exactly ...

Excellent reasoning... If bitcoin was about locking databases that would be just the very kind of quantification that should go into its specification.

Unfortunately, bitcoin is a little more about attaining, storing and transmitting a proven state of consensus than about controlling how many entities can access how many bits of it, and which bits, exactly, for that matter. If number of simultaneous accesses to the data enters into the spec it ought more to lean toward "as many as possible, even if that means having more than one complete copy of the entire dataset in existence on the planet at any given moment".

Basically, bitcoin is intended to give lots of entities access to the same data, so locks are actually anathema to its entire purpose and goal.

Thus while acknowledging the brilliance of your solution I find myself forced to say sorry but it still seems to me that number of database locks in a single corporation or other entity's living executing implementation or copy of an implementation is one of the many things that should if at all possible be abstracted away by the second star to the right and straight on 'til morning specification.

-MarkM-

Ah, excellent, can you please send me the documentation that says exactly how many locks will be taken by each bdb operation?  I haven't been able to find that.  Thanks!

Argh... BDB doesn't allow for an unlimited number of locks? (how many your system can handle, that is)
It really needs to specify a limit?