Re: Addressing Block size and occasional mempool congestion
The debate about increasing the block space has been raised multiple times in the Bitcoin community but it has been rejected because it will lead to the centralization of miners which is completely against the idea of Bitcoin's existence.
why not just be honest and say it this way:Quote
The debate about increasing the block space has been raised multiple times in the Bitcoin community but it has been rejected because it will lead to larger storage requirements and people don't want to do that.
1TB is old tech. they are making hard drives 20+TB now. lets get with the times.
I think the main two technological reasons to not increase block size are storage space, as you mentioned, and propagation time through the network.
If it were only storage space of nodes alone, the blocksize could gradually increase over time as storage gets cheaper, still keeping nodes super cheap to set up.
But I believe the main reason is propagation time, and someone correct me if I'm wrong. The more data in blocks the longer it takes to send data over the internet and propagate across the bitcoin network, including the time it takes nodes to process the blocks to make sure they are valid. This congestion would cause a lot more orphaned blocks and slow down the network. Also a theoretical entity trying to do a 51% attack could mine a bunch of blocks by itself without sending it out over the network, using the network's long propagation times and often-orphaned blocks to have a better chance to get ahead of the chain and then send out their mined blocks to actually do a 51% attack.