[bitcoin-discuss] What are the size/sigop limits for?

I apologize for not giving credit to whoever brought this up at/after the Montreal meeting as a key question to ask: I'm really curious to get a general idea of what people think the size limits are for. Do you think they should be purely a denial-of-service prevention measure? Do you think they serve an economic purpose (e.g. to "create a transaction fee market")? Do you think they serve a security function (e.g. "prevent centralization that might make the network vulnerable to attack")? Something else? What do you think is the best long-term option for the limits that you've heard? I'll go first: I think they were put in place originally purely as a DoS-prevention mechanism. Certainly MAX_BLOCK_SIGOPS serves (only) that purpose. I don't think they *should* be used to influence the economics of the system. I don't think they increase the security of the system by any measurable amount. My preference for the limits is no hard-coded limits at all, just aDoS prevention mechanism that rejects too-expensive-to-validate-blocks, where "too expensive" is an emergent property of the network that evolves over time. I'm genuinely curious to see what other people think, so lets not try to convince each other we're being ignorant and stupid-- I'd just like to know what people are thinking. -- -- Gavin Andresen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-discuss/attachments/20160208/ab789a40/attachment.html>