what's interesting to me is that all these full blocks that have been coming more frequently and consecutively have not caused any block delays. that is good news b/c there are some who thought that as we filled the 1MB limit, there might be delays and have pointed to just this mechanism in the past when we've had such delays. so we know 1MB blocks don't slow down the network. so just how high can we push this limit w/o breaking it?
what's also really interesting is that currently, i'm not seeing any 0 tx defensive blocks being mined. maybe the Chinese miners are figuring out that it's not necessary. that's more good news b/c we want them munching as many tx's as possible in a consistent manner.
and that's good news b/c they are probably figuring out that a block size increase can't hurt them if done in a "safe" way, whatever that means.
I think that if we see blocks fill up and the network starts functioning poorly, we are going to see a change pushed out far quicker then any of us ever imagined.
As of 12:03pm eastern time blockchain.info is reporting 11.6MB unconfirmed transactions and 1.95BTC in fees (mostly from minimum fees).
Is there another stress test going on? Or did a bunch of guys decide to flood the network to push for larger blocks...
Not sure but as I understand it an increase in value is new information and new information results is market players adjusting and I imagine that means moving their BTC around as a result of changes in behavior.
I'm not expecting a pop just yet but I don't think maintaining as we are with relatively full blocks is an indication that we'll cope with an increase of tx's if we see the growth the market is anticipating.
If this is a true demand situation based on the recent price movement, then if we have a real bubble move the network is simply going to not be able to handle demand. Increasing fees is not an option because there isn't enough space for everyone regardless of the fees they offer.
What is happening right now shows that P2P nodes can in fact handle larger blocks, they are processing the transaction volume fine and have enough BW to forward transactions. In fact by not clearing transactions in blocks and causing the memory pool to increase beyond what it should, the
1MB limit is probably more stressful on nodes than simply letting larger blocks get processed....