Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
by
HeliKopterBen
on 13/08/2015, 19:03:18 UTC
[...]
So…is this a good idea?  If there are no obvious "gotchas" then perhaps we should write up a BIP.


I'd be willing to help! But I'd also suggest to just make it about the configurable setting and leave the rest to the user. I think signalling about blocksize has to happen out-of-band for the time being. Because it is potentially a lot of code complexity. And simple IMO beats complex here.

Just make it mandatory to start bitcoind with -maxblocksizelimit (or similar) and have an edit box for bitcoin-qt that has to be filled with a value. The amount of code change should be about the same as BIP101.

Start requesting this value at some switchover date in the future - maybe at the beginning of Gavin's increase schedule. Reason for this: Time for user education on building a function Bitcoin network.

What do you think?

I think that all makes perfect sense, and I agree that simple is better!  Perhaps the BIP could only advocate for doing what you said to start, and then there could be a follow-up BIP to do the signalling in the block headers and to add the p2p "block size limit request" messages.  The nice thing is that the signalling stuff in the follow-up BIP would have nothing to do with the consensus layer, so it would be much easier to build support for it.  

I'd be willing to contribute to this too.  Realistically, I couldn't do any serious work on this until mid-September, however.  Timing wise, it would be great to have a polished proposal published for the second Scalability Workshop in Hong Kong probably in November or December: https://scalingbitcoin.org/

I'm actually quite excited about this idea.  It has a sort of inevitable feel to it.


I think you guys are on to something here.  Could you have an option in the dropdown to choose a dynamic limit that is 1 standard deviation above a 30 day moving average (or use data points of the previous 4320 blocks, which is about 1 month, to calculate variance), or something similar?  That way the user could set his limit to stay within a reasonable upper range without restricting usage.