Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>There's no technological reason for a 1MB limit that makes any sense. Bitcoin started in 2009. Since then there have been 4 main generations of the Raspberry pi, disks went in size from ~1-2TB maximum to ~20TB maximum, gigabit internet became fairly commonplace, and CPUs also improved greatly.

Increasing the block size from 1MB to say... 20MB ... will inevitably reduce the number of participants able to run full validating nodes. Consider various discussions on network traffic patterns for existing 1MB blocks: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3286296.0

So the question is: Is the reduction of participants from the higher technical requirements significant enough that it weakens Bitcoin? (I honestly don't know.)

I guess someone can put together a spreadsheet model with some "reasonable" guesses for the ripple effects of a hypothetical 20MB block size and try to predict game theory of what might happen. Has anyone done such a math exercise?

Sure, many participants already processing 1MB blocks today can easily switch to bigger 20MB blocks with no problems. But many can't and we don't seem to have a consensus prediction on what the percentage is.

> Increasing the block size from 1MB to say... 20MB ... will inevitably reduce the number of participants able to run full validating nodes. Consider various discussions on network traffic patterns for existing 1MB blocks: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3286296.0

That discussion is from 2018, that was 4 years ago. Surely things have improved somewhat since then.

> So the question is: Is the reduction of participants from the higher technical requirements significant enough that it weakens Bitcoin? (I honestly don't know.)

No, that's far too simple of a question. A better is: where do you find the balance between technical requirements for the network and the usability of the network for end user?

It makes perfect sense that as the usage grows, the network will become more expensive to operate. More users is more data, and more bandwidth. If you just refuse to increase the requirements an inch, you're refusing to support the growing userbase.

Many other projects have to make such decisions. Your space sim gets more popular -- that costs more bandwidth, requires more polygons on the screen. Do you bump up the system requirements, or do you stall your growth to allow 10 year old hardware to be usable? And pretty much all of them bump the requirements. You can't play modern games on a 386.

You're optimizing for the wrong thing here IMO. You should optimize for decentralization. Without it, there is no point to Bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency for that matter). Increasing the block size won't solve the inherent problems with scaling the bitcoin blockchain. The only thing it will end up doing is push the can down the road and result in less full nodes running on the network.

The solution is of course to not increase the block size but to scale in other ways, like for example the Lightning Network.

The size of the blockchain right now is 390GB. It grows at 144MB/day. You can get a 2TB hard disk for $50 right now, and it'll be enough for 30 years more.

1 MB blocks take 2 minutes and 30 seconds on at 56 Kbps, which means you can keep up with the blockchain on a freaking dial-up modem.

I'm not seeing exactly where the problem is here, and in what scenario would somebody go "Gee, I'd love to run a full node, if only it took something less amazing than a computer I can find lying in the garbage for free".

If you want more nodes what you need instead is incentives to run a node. Give people some reason to run one other than that it provides some nebulous benefit to the network, and so it's a good thing to run this out of the goodness of their hearts.

You also don't have to store the entire history. Technically keeping a day's worth of blocks is sufficient to run validation.

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