Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: The block size limit controversy: a proper poll (30 days)
by
Timo Y
on 21/02/2013, 19:54:43 UTC
I support misterbigg's idea of miner-voted limit changes [...]

Why miner-voted as opposed to stakeholder-voted?

Because "stakeholder-voted" is not technically or politically feasible. After all, what is included in a block is up to miners. Also, I think in the long term what's good for miners is good for the network, and good for anyone with Bitcoins.

When the hard limit starts to constrain Bitcoin's usefulness, this will tend to cause a decrease in Bitcoin's value, and thus, a decrease in miners' real profit. So, eventually, miners are going to want to increase the limit.

Technically, it's feasible. This is how it could be done: Create a non-standard "vote transaction" that sends 0 bitcoins and stores a vote in the script.  Every X blocks, the protocol mandates that the block size changes according to all vote transactions since the last change, ignoring duplicates.  Votes are weighed according to how many bitcoins are stored in the vote transactions' inputs.

If the majority of users, including large bitcoin businesses, use a hard-forked client with above rules, the miners would be forced to accept them.  Yes, what is included in a block is up to miners, but whether that block gets rejected by the users' clients is NOT up to them.  So politically, it's feasible too.