Altcoin News: Bitcoin Developer Suggests Temporarily Reducing Block Size to 300 Kb

February 15, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Co-founder of Blockstream and one of the developers of Bitcoin, Luke Dashjr proposed to temporarily reduce the block size to 300 kilobytes to maintain the integrity of the network and increase commissions. He noted that he had already prepared the code to reduce the block size.

The fact is that miners who extract blocks in the Bitcoin network and confirm transactions receive a small commission for confirming transactions. Recently, commissions on the first cryptocurrency network have dropped significantly and reached the level of 2014, so it would be nice to increase commissions to support miners.

Of course, miners also receive a reward for finding a block, which currently stands at 12,5 BTC. However, every four years, the remuneration is halved and, after the next decline, miners may leave the network, as Bitcoin mining will become unprofitable. And here, commission increases can also help.

It is worth emphasizing that reducing the block size will help increase transaction fees, but, on the other hand, will make the main problem of the Bitcoin network even more acute. We are talking about scalability — it is the small block size that caused the limited bandwidth of the first cryptocurrency network. On the other hand, this will be the reason for more frequent use of the Lightning Network and the SegWit protocol.

Recall that, according to the resource transactionfee.info, the number of transactions in the Bitcoin network increased to the level of January 2018, when the rate of the first cryptocurrency reached $20,000. Meanwhile, what do you think the reduction will do to Bitcoin?

Author: Marko Vidrih