If enough people on the bitcoin network agreed. I believe 88% is the number or near. Can a change be imposed to increase block size? 🤔
Discussion
Wasn’t that one of Bitcoin Cash’s objectives? But it didn’t get enough support.
Bitcoin cash is 8mb block, bitcoin is 1mb. I also feel hashrate is high enough we could even change block times.
Bitcoin Cash is effectively 32 MB.
Bitcoin is effectively 4 MB
But this can be changed without forking. In the future. And what about block times.
The block time target of 10 minutes helps with decentralization as the blocks can be propagated and validated and still leave a fairly level playing field for mining blocks to attain initial subsidy and transaction fees.
Changing the block time would likely be much harder than the block size as it influences the rate of subsidy issuance. Making it shorter would cause issuance to run out before the initial assumed timeline. Making it longer would extend it making miners less profitable.
The typical naive assumption is that faster block times are better to allow for more transactions. But this trends to centralization. The converse, slower blocktimes, allows for the center of hash to be larger in the universe. Right now it's impractical to mine Bitcoin from as close as Mars. Not because we dont have miners there, but because of the time it takes to roundtrip information about a found block would cause those on Mars to be behind. If block times were an hour, then miners on Mars could compete.
There’s a whole book written on why you shouldn’t 😄
https://blog.bitmex.com/the-blocksize-war-chapter-1-first-strike/
IMHO, increasing block size is on the table in the future, but its still much too early for that. Historically, the size went from scalable, to 1 MB, and then increased 4X to 4MB with SegWit in 2017.
Outside of Bitcoin's consensus rules, to maintain decentralization, globally we need to ensure infrastructure buildout of more high speed network, CPU speed and storage. Another caveat to larger block sizes is that it allows for faster growth of the UTXO set as well. We need to be mindful of all of these residual effects and keep it balanced.
In the near term, I'm more in favor of reducing the block size than I am in increasing it. Reducing puts constraints that allows other parts of the world to catch up, and makes it more viable to run nodes on mobile phones.
Would make a new coin, therefore would not be bitcoin anymore
When they updated to taproot it didn't create a coin. What updates can cause a fork and what updates will not cause a fork
I would see additional bitcoin coming first. Oh we lost 10 of the 21m. Let's add 10m more.
On a long time horizon, I'm also open to ideas around recycling coins that haven't moved after a time.
For example, if a UTXO hasn't been spent after 13,440,000 blocks (64 halving epochs or roughly 256 years), then there could potentially be a sweeping of those UTXOs as earned to the miner that mines that block.
None of this would happen in my lifetime, but this could affect long run institutions, people who choose cryostasis and are brought back, etc. so need to consider the impacts.
Disagree. How do you know the keys haven't passed thru the generations for 256 years?
Unlikely I know, but who are we to judge/steal?
😉
That's why my example is set enough in the future that none of us now would directly benefit.
For keys passed through generations, they'd be aware of changes and make transactions as necessary to signal that the keys are still operable.
The concern is more for those who are unconscious in cryostasis (Hal Finney being one of them) and any long time locked scripts that would prevent a spend between now and then.
I'm a hard No on any such endeavor to recycle unspent UTXOs with an age less than longest human lifespan.
You can agree solo. Just run other software and hardfork from Bitcoin. In the end, the hashrate seems to be the indicator what 'the people' want.
Bitcoin Cash tried that:
So what is the agreement percent needed for an upgrade or change? 88% orrr.
Significant changes require social consensus. There is no way to ascertain the percentage of social consensus without some formal registry and vote system. Everyone takes a leap of faith in some regard, but ultimately chooses what makes economic sense to them. That may or may not be immediately consistent with their peers. Hence, Roger Ver forking off to Bitcoin Cash, and later Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright with Bitcoin SV.
The signaling performed for SegWit and TapRoot was miner signaling of "readiness", indicating that they could support an upgrade. There's no way to know if they were truthful or lying until such time came for the soft fork.
A soft fork works as an opt-in deployment by making rules more restrictive to those that follow them, and relies on an economic majority to avoid having their funds swept by those that don't upgrade. A hard fork on the other hand, is a change in subsidy, size, etc that REQUIRES people to change to that version or else they are cut off.
I do know for taproot to be implemented, they had to have a certain amount of the miners to agree.
That was the signalling for readiness following Speedy Trial. I was running the first taproot client for BIP 8, LOT=True which would have forced the issue at the same block height taproot was activated.
Nodes set consensus rules, but it helps to have miners enforce as well as it demonstrates broader consensus. If miners didn't signal, or gamed signaling as was done during segwit, then more would have switched to UASF approach.