As a community, it’s time to admit agreeing on a long term algorithmic block size solution is not happening soon. For a healthy Bitcoin in the near to mid term, we need both the optimization of existing space and an expansion of space to arrive at Bitcoin’s best possible outcome. It’s time that *both sides* start planning Bitcoin’s hard fork together, or we’ll end up with two chains.

May I (not so) humbly suggest we try to find a middle ground between 1MB and Unlimited. The community at large must agree neither is the exact right answer.

1MB is a magic number that’s unlikely to be correct. Many in the community are ready for 8MB today. However, there are valid concerns with allowing a large jump, and Core believes in building more software improvements first.

Here, I’ll suggest a starting proposal of a one time modest bump with 4 years of 30% growth:

At block height 500000 (~14.5 months away)

we set MAX_BLOCK_SIZE = 2718281

For the next 52560 blocks, block size will increase by 15 bytes each block.

I.e. at height 552560, MAX_BLOCK_SIZE = 3506681

For the next 52560 blocks, increase by 20 bytes per block

For the next 52560 blocks, increase by 26 bytes per block

For the next 52560 blocks, increase by 33 bytes per block

At block height 710240, MAX_BLOCK_SIZE will be 7658921 and we can let the wrasslin begin again (or perhaps install our favorite finished flex-cap solution).

Please note, this is absolutely not my personal preferred solution. I honestly think much larger blocks are beneficial and possible without fatal effects. This is proposed to the community as a middle ground compromise. I’d love to hear thoughts from both sides.

P.S. It’s possible to mitigate quadratic signature exploits by introducing a 1MB transaction limit.

P.P.S. Here are some slides that can help frame the current situation