Prioritized transactions, and tx fees

[QuantumMechanic]

Where does the 1Mb limit come from? Is it a technical limit, or simply hardcoded to save bandwidth?

It's just an arbitrary limit, probably to limit the effects of DoS attacks. You won't accept blocks over 1 decimal megabyte.

Is there a technical limit beyond this artificial one?  Would it just be the bandwidth available to the weakest (in terms of bandwidth) nodes, or are there any inherent limitations of the p2p network itself?

[martin]

I doubt there is a technical limit, I can't see any reason there should be such a limit (besides, as already mentioned, protecting from DoS attacks).

That means that if the limited block size becomes a problem, it can be scaled up at such a time. Which also means we probably don't need to worry about it at the moment.

[theymos]

Is there a technical limit beyond this artificial one?  Would it just be the bandwidth available to the weakest (in terms of bandwidth) nodes, or are there any inherent limitations of the p2p network itself?

If there are any technical limits (from data types or whatever), they can be eliminated in the same way that MAX_BLOCK_SIZE can be increased.

Storage is the main issue, I think: an attacker could create huge blocks that every full network node has to store forever. With just 1 BTC you can create a block of 15+ GB by splitting it into 100,000,000 "nanocoins".

In the future most people will run Bitcoin in a "simple" mode that doesn't require downloading full blocks or transactions. At that point MAX_BLOCK_SIZE can be increased a lot.

[dmg46664]

Storage is the main issue, I think: an attacker could create huge blocks that every full network node has to store forever. With just 1 BTC you can create a block of 15+ GB by splitting it into 100,000,000 "nanocoins".

How about this idea! The algorithm is updated to deny any blocks that have transactions in them that are less than 1/10th of the average (or median) transaction fee from say the last 300 blocks. That does mean that the currency isn't effectively divisible... but it isn't anyway! In that your transactions will never get processed if you send them with less than the lowest fees (as the fees start to rise). It would then become quite costly (in bitcoins) to launch such an attack.

If you like this idea, send some bitcoin happiness to
1Gc3BAjW4jD1GCCphdqCSNsWHFHGyu8k4f

I just joined the craze last week! :-)

Daniel G
Apologies if this idea has already been mentioned...

[Elwar]

It ramps up the fee requirement as the block fills up:

<50KB  free
50KB   0.01
250KB  0.02
333KB  0.03
375KB  0.04
etc.

It's a typical pricing mechanism.  After the first 50KB sells out, the price is raised to 0.01.  After 250KB is sold, it goes up to 0.02.  At some price, you can pretty much always get in if you're willing to outbid the other customers.

Just including the minimum 0.01 goes a long way.

Satoshi's response to the block size debate.


Also:

The current threshold is 200KB per block, or about 1000 transactions per block.  I think it should be lowered to 50KB per block.  That would still be more than 100 times the average transactions per block.

The threshold can easily be changed in the future.  We can decide to increase it when the time comes.  It's a good idea to keep it lower as a circuit breaker and increase it as needed.  If we hit the threshold now, it would almost certainly be some kind of flood and not actual use.  Keeping the threshold lower would help limit the amount of wasted disk space in that event.

[MoonShadow]

Um, why Elwar?

[iCEBREAKER]

Scaling to high transaction rate has always been my main concern about viability of bitcoin.  I'm much more concerned about scalability than government shutdown, for example.

The 'fancy Visa' heresy is older than I thought!

Talk about failing to grok the ethos (early and often).

So Garzik is a limousine libertarian.  No wonder he's so eager to help Olivier Janssens engage in pointless/dangerous vanity forks based on retail payment rail business requirements.

[Kprawn]

There are a lot of people who do not want Bitcoin to be another PayPal or a VISA competitor. I disagree with them, because I think the cheaper micro transactions

capability of Bitcoin is one of it's strongest advantages. We should concentrate on tapping the potential of the strong points, without sacrificing the security. I think the

hesitation to increase the block size, come from the risk it pose for the security. We should find a good balance between performance and security, before we go forward

with a fork. 

[iCEBREAKER]

There are a lot of people who do not want Bitcoin to be another PayPal or a VISA competitor. I disagree with them, because I think the cheaper micro transactions capability of Bitcoin is one of it's strongest advantages.

The fantasy of making BTC into yet another PayPal or VISA competitor is never going to happen on Layer One.

Bitfury Valery permanently demolished that nonsense in this domination post.

https://medium.com/@BitFuryGroup/keep-calm-and-bitcoin-on-4f29d581276