Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: A Scalability Roadmap
by
Cubic Earth
on 08/10/2014, 20:24:16 UTC
I think that a really conservative automatic increase would be OK, but 50% yearly sounds too high to me. If this happens to exceed some residential ISP's actual bandwidth growth, then eventually that ISP's customers will be unable to be full nodes unless they pay for a much more expensive Internet connection. The idea of this sort of situation really concerns me, especially since the loss of full nodes would likely be gradual and easy to ignore until after it becomes very difficult to correct.

As I mentioned on Reddit, I'm also not 100% sure that I agree with your proposed starting point of 50% of a hobbyist-level Internet connection. This seems somewhat burdensome for individuals. It's entirely possible that Bitcoin can be secure without a lot of individuals running full nodes, but I'm not sure about this.

Would 40% initial size and growth make you support the proposal?

I made a chart showing how some different slopes and y-intercepts compare over time.  As you might be able to guess from the chart, I am partial to the idea to jump starting the process with an initial increase of a few MB, then having a slightly more conservative growth rate going forward.  We know 10 MB blocks (70 TPS) can be supported by many of today's home internet connections.  I would argue it is quite a bit less certain if 3,000 MB blocks would be realistic in 20 years.  Put another way:  I think we are behind the curve.  Making a steeper curve to compensate could really throw us off in the future, but adjusting the Y-intercept to put us back on track, and then making a good guess about the future would be better.