Topic: What are the downsides to 8MB blocks? - page 6. (Read 5376 times)

But they can wait 1.25 minutes to have their newly mined block trasfered to the next node?

China’s five largest mining pools gathered at the National Conference Center in Beijing to hold a technical discussion about the ramifications of increasing the max block size on the Bitcoin network. In attendance were F2Pool, BW, BTCChina, Huobi.com, and Antpool. After undergoing deep consideration and discussion, the five pools agree that while the block size does need to be increased, a compromise should be made to increase the network max block size to 8 megabytes. We believe that this is a realistic short term adjustment that remains fair to all miners and node operators worldwide.

Why upgrade to 8MB but not 20MB?

1.Chinese internet bandwidth infrastructure is not built out to the same advanced level as those found in other countries.

2.Chinese outbound bandwidth is restricted; causing increased latency in connections between China & Europe or the US.

3.Not all Chinese mining pools are ready for the jump to 20MB blocks, and fear that this could cause an orphan rate that is too high.

The bitcoin miners of China agree that the blocksize must be increased, but we believe that increasing to 8MB first is the most reasonable course of action. We believe that 20MB blocks will cause a high orphan rate for miners, leading to hard forks down the road. If the bitcoin community can come to a consensus to upgrade to 8MB blocks first, we believe that this lays a strong foundation for future discussions around the block size. At present, China’s five largest mining pools account for more than 60% of the network hashrate.

Miners cant wait 10 minutes to have their newly mined block trasfered to the next node.

8MB per 10 minutes is about 13.6 KB/s. What was the problem again?

This is a good question, I've also wanted to clearly know the answer to this.

What about companies that have API's or have built something connected to the blockchain? Will they have to do something at the fork? All of them? Because I imagine that would be a nightmare to do every two years.

Or is it not like that?

We've identified a fundamental disagreement in:

- The block size maximum consensus rule serves to limit mining centralization

But as said I believe at least 2 different formal proofs can be
produced that in fact this is the case. One of them (the one I'm
working on) remains true even after superluminal communication, free
unlimited global bandwidth and science fiction snarks.
But let's just list the concerns first.

I believe there's 2 categories:

1) Increasing the block size may increase centralization.

- Mining centralization will get worse (for example, China's aggregate
hashrate becomes even larger)
   - Government control in a single jurisdiction could enforce
transaction censorship and destroy irreversibility of transactions
      - Some use cases that rely on a decentralized chain (like
trustless options) cannot rely on Bitcoin anymore.
      - Reversible transactions will have proportional fees rather
than flat ones.
         - Some use cases that rely on flat fees (like remittance) may
not be practical in Bitcoin anymore
- The full node count will decrease, leaving less resources to serve SPV nodes.

2) Trying to avoid "hitting the limit" permanently minimizes minimum
fees (currently zero) and fees in general

- If fees' block reward doesn't increase enough, the subsidy block
reward may become insufficient to protect the irreversibility of the
system at some point in time, and the system is attacked and destroyed
at that point in time
- Miners will continue to run noncompetitive block creation policies
(ie accepting free transactions)
- More new Bitcoin businesses may be created based on unsustainable
assumptions and consequently fail.
- "Free transactions bitcoin marketing" may continue and users may get
angry when they discover they have been lied about the sustainability
of that property and the reliability of free transactions.

Please suggest more concerns or new categories if you think they're needed.

afaik some bandwidth problem for miners(chinese) and probably the fact that 8MB is not a final solution, because you need to fork again in the future, that will arise all the same problems, that we are facing right now, for this size increase

How is that? What prevents anyone from sending 8 times (or 100 times) as much spam as what we've seen recently?

What we need is a slight change in the default fee setting for Bitcoin nodes, that still allow very cheap payments (also micropayments) but helps against mass spam / dust transactions. Something similar to what Litecoin does, by requiring an additional small fee for each small output in a tx (and perhaps for each small input as well, while we're at it).

How is that? What prevents anyone from sending 8 times (or 100 times) as much spam as what we've seen recently?

What we need is a slight change in the default fee setting for Bitcoin nodes, that still allow very cheap payments (also micropayments) but helps against mass spam / dust transactions. Something similar to what Litecoin does, by requiring an additional small fee for each small output in a tx (and perhaps for each small input as well, while we're at it).

I don't know of the downside though. Why are so many people against this? I don't understand.

It will solve the spam attacks problem.