Thoughts on Bitcoin Block Size Economics
In October of 2014, Gavin Andresen sparked a community-wide debate over the future of the hard-coded, 1 MB size-cap on Bitcoin blocks. Andresen proposed a change to the Bitcoin protocol that would implement an upward-scaling block size limit, necessitating a hard-fork of the blockchain. Many people opposed this idea — mainly on economic grounds. They argued that a constantly increasing block size limit would make the supply of block-space far outstrip the demand for transactions, which would greatly diminish transaction fees. Falling transaction fees would become a severe problem once the....
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Bitcoin mining company BitFury’s CEO Valery Vavilov has been clear on the company’s stance in the Bitcoin block size debate. When we contacted him for his thoughts on the debate, Valery sent a full statement detailing where BitFury stood on the issue and why. While going over this statement with BitFury, they gave us access to the news of their new 16nm chip announcement. The timing of this release follows its climb to the second largest hash rate provider in the world. Furthermore, BitFury is aggressively building out its 100 MW data center in Georgia. Valery’s well thought out statement....
“Let’s Raise the Bitcoin Block Size!” That’s Roger Ver’s take on the block size debate. But the Bitcoin leader has been such a staunch proponent of increasing the block size, we at CCN, thought we’d take some of Roger’s most recent quotes on increasing the block size so that Bitcoin can take on more transactions and make a listicle. 1. “I’m sure the current core developers are talented programmers, but most of them are clueless when it comes to basic economics, and providing an incentive for people to use Bitcoin.” 2. “I’m currently exploring options including starting my own mining pool,....
This week, bitcoin Jesus Roger Ver weighed in on the block size debate stating that the block size limit should be increased if it is technologically achievable. Specifically, Ver tweeted: The block size debate has been underway for some time now and a lot of developers including Bitcoin Core Developers and the Bitcoin community are getting exasperated with the current impasse. In addition, many developers are now spending a lot of time and money seeking alternative solutions. If every 1MB block were always full, it would take over 55 years to fill my new HD. Let's raise the block size....
The founder of the Bitcoin Association Switzerland, Luzius Meisser, recently released the results of a block size survey he conducted. He wanted to test the differences in which entrepreneurial and technical mindsets viewed the block size problem. His hypothesis stated that entrepreneurs likely favor larger blocks than those of a technical mindset. “And the answer seems yes.” Of 269 respondents, 146 preferred a block size between 0.5 MB and unlimited, with most preferring more than 4GB. Meisser determines this is because he received more responses from r/btc readers than /r/bitcoin....
Chinese miners would not need to worry about explosive block size growth either, as the maximum rate of growth is capped at twice the previous size. There will be no jumps from 1MB blocks to 2MB blocks and then suddenly increasing to 8 MB. This should give the local Internet infrastructure enough time to ramp up the overall network speed and [try to] get rid of data caps. For those people looking to see the Bitcoin block size debate coming to an end, that will not be happening anytime soon, unfortunately. Things have gotten more interesting a few weeks ago when rumours....