The Decentralist Perspective, or Why Bitcoin Might Need Small Blocks
The block-size limit debate has dominated Bitcoin blogs, forums, chat rooms and meet-ups for months on end, while many of Bitcoin's brightest minds are gathering in Montreal to discuss the issue face-to-face at the Scaling Bitcoin Workshop this weekend. So far, however, the two sides of the debate have made little progress coming to a consensus. At least....
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Empty blocks have turned into a controversial topic in the Bitcoin community over the past few months. This renewed attention on the topic has been sparked by the number of nearly-empty blocks mined by Antpool recently. An empty block is one that only contains a coinbase transaction. This may seem counterproductive, but there are incentives in place that make mining empty blocks a practical endeavor from the perspective of a miner. Why Do Miners Mine Empty Blocks? According to Bitcoin Core contributor Matt Corallo, there are three main reasons as to why empty blocks have been mined in the....
Gaining a deeper understanding of a popular — but widely misunderstood — concept in blockchain technology: the consensus algorithm. Cointelegraph is following the development of an entirely new blockchain from inception to mainnet and beyond through its series Inside the Blockchain Developer’s Mind. In previous parts, Andrew Levine of Koinos Group discussed some of the challenges the team has faced since identifying the key issues they intend to solve and outlined three of the “crises” that are holding back blockchain adoption: upgradeability, scalability and governance. This series is....
Gaining a deeper understanding of a popular — but meanwhile widely misunderstood — concept in blockchain technology: the consensus algorithm. Cointelegraph is following the development of an entirely new blockchain from inception to mainnet and beyond through its series, Inside the Blockchain Developer’s Mind. In previous parts, Andrew Levine of Koinos Group discussed some of the challenges the team has faced since identifying the key issues they intend to solve and outlined three of the “crises” that are holding back blockchain adoption: upgradeability, scalability, and governance. This....
Blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain have a maximum size of 1 MB. Proof of work difficulty is calibrated so 1 block is created every 10 minutes. It is generally accepted a miner would want to maximise the number of transactions it includes in a block as it collects the transaction fees. Logically, with the growing popularity of Bitcoin, the average block size is getting closer to its limit. In this environment, it is surprising to see a number of empty blocks being mined. An empty block is not entirely empty, it has 1 transaction : the coinbase transaction which allocates the mining reward to....
Bitcoin is designed as a peer-to-peer network, where nodes randomly connect to other nodes. Transactions and blocks are transmitted over this network by these nodes, until each node receives all the latest transactions and blocks. This works quite well, as the distributed model makes Bitcoin relatively censorship-resistant; there is no central point of control to shut down or pressure into compliance. But there are other, more centralized alternatives for transmitting transaction data, too. The best known of these is "the" relay network, introduced in 2014 and maintained by Bitcoin Core....