Bitcoin Forum

Blockstream co-founder and Bitcoin developer Luke Jr has proposed that the Bitcoin block size be reduced to 300kb temporarily. A report says he has already written the code for the shrinking of the block size. This may be motivated by an effort to maintain network integrity by reducing block size and increasing transaction fees.

Miners, the group of people who verify transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain are incentivized by paying a small fee for every Bitcoin transaction they verify. As a matter of fact, transactions are sometimes prioritized based on the fees attached to them especially when there are several transactions waiting to be processed.

Although they also get block rewards (currently 6 BTC) for mining blocks of transactions, this reward is halved every four years, which raises concerns that the network may not be secured by miners when block rewards become negligible in years to come unless fees are raised to continue to as incentive.

Although the reduction is temporary and the reason isn’t clearly stated, this may be the reason for the concerns, but they are contrary to the problems the Bitcoin network is actually facing. A major challenge to the scalability of Bitcoin has been the block size limit of 1mb which drastically reduces the number of transactions it can process in a second.

This has been the weak point Roger Ver, a prominent Bitcoin Cash supporter has used to say the Bitcoin Cash network is better than Bitcoin’s due to the small block size. The block size limit actually caused the fork of Bitcoin Cash from the main Bitcoin blockchain in 2017. The question is, how is a further reduction from 1mb to 300kb going to help Bitcoin to scale?

The cryptocurrency industry is experiencing growth right now and its future is getting brighter as institutional investors are getting into the market. Clearly, scalability will be a major determinant of which cryptocurrency gets favored and the industry does not want to leave the number one cryptocurrency behind.

The developers of all people should know this so we can only assume they have plans to make Bitcoin scale, so the temporary reduction may be to carry out a few experiments. The proposal has not been approved any way so we’ll wait and see what happens with the proposal. Meanwhile, what do you think the reduction will do to Bitcoin?

Source:  ZyCrypto (https://zycrypto.com/bitcoin-developers-propose-temporary-reduction-of-block-size-to-300-kilobyte-1-megabyte/)

Even if there are less bitcoins being released it doesn't matter because the value in usd goes up. It just means they are selling smaller fractions of bitcoin for the same amount in usd

I do not understand the technical aspects, but I can comment on how the consequences of this idea can bring, if before we had a big war because a group wanted to increase the blocks, so imagine if they said they want to reduce the blocks? Another war will arise. Roger ver, faketoshi and Wu will certainly see this as another opportunity to spread their venom in the bitcoin community and this not help bitcoin

is there any bitcoin developer besides luke that's interested in doing this? i doubt it!


not much. orphan rates are already minimal. it would make running a node a bit easier---lower bandwidth requirements and adds less bootstrap data over time vs current block size. but the bandwidth savings can be realized in other ways (with local node settings) and the bootstrap improvements aren't that big.

it's a band-aid that hardly even covers the wound. i really don't understand what luke is thinking.

Nope:

Another clickbait title from bitcoin news media combined with a boost for bcash hehehe. Also, this would not be unexpected if this is a paid article by bcash promoters.

The corruption in the cryptospace is everywhere.

Exactly this. I've had the OP on ignore for some time now due to the constant posting of non-articles like this.

What a joke.

I saw a thread on the fake Bitcoin side of Reddit where BTrash supporters were celebrating the downfal of BTC and how their shitcoin has way larger blocks to onboard the world. These idiots don't realize that even when you have 1TB blocks, if there is no usage to begin with, your block size is completely irrelevant. They can perfectly cap their blocks well under 300KB and still enjoy years worth of very low fees.

BSV is even worse, they can cap their blocks at 50KB and still have plenty of empty block space left to fill up with imaginary transactions. Just as imaginary as Crack the Scammer Wrong. :D

I saw the tweets and it seems to be a brain fart coming from a pretty eccentric developer. Even the most competent developers have their own ideas on how to work on problems, even though this isn't the best one.

Does anyone knows what the current blocksize is would a miner fill it with solely with SegWit transactions? Do they still have to respect that 1MB base size due to the backward compatibility of the different (non SegWit) releases?

The largest ever minted block is 2.3MB with a stripped size of 556KB. It's a block that was used to consolidate over 7000 inputs. Based on the stripped size, would a 4MB block be the most you can squeeze out?