Gavin Andresen Is Ready to Bump to 2MB

Gavin Andresen has initiated a newly written BIP proposal on Github concerning the block size increase. The change called “bip-bump2mb.mediawiki” is a BIP102 variation for a 2mb block size bump. One particularly notable aspect written was the consensus section was chosen to be 75% over 95% which Andresen explains was guided by prior events:

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“The choices of constants for the deployment scheme were motivated by prior experience with upgrades to the Bitcoin consensus rules: 0x10000000 was chosen to be compatible with the BIP 9 proposal for parallel deployment of soft forks 75% was chosen instead of 95% to minimize the opportunity for a single large mining pool or miner to be able to veto an increase, either because of ideological opposition or threat of violence or extortion. A four-week grace period after the voting period was chosen as a balance between giving people sufficient time to upgrade and keeping people’s attention on the urgent need to upgrade.”

The proposal by the core developer has been viewed by some in the community as a good “compromise.” One redditor from the /r/btc forum post says, “Good job Gavin Andresen. So far, you’ve demonstrated time and again a willingness to compromise even in the face of relentless stonewalling.” It seems most people were confident about the BIP announcement which is a “one-time increase in total amount of transaction data permitted in a block from 1MB to 2MB, with limits on signature operations and hashing.” Bitcoin.com has reported in the past that a 2MB increase has been the most popular choice so far but to some it is not much of a step up.

The implementation as mentioned above will only need 75% of the hashpower to trigger the change, and is also followed by a 28-day grace period. This proposal states this will add “1,300,000,000 bytes hashed to compute transaction signatures per block.” The change request will expire in January of 2018 and is not backwards compatible. Now Miners and the community must voice their support with hash and debate for this proposal to gain steam. However the community members on most forums from /r/bitcoin, /r/btc, Bitcoin.com’s forum, Bitcointalk.org seem positive. Andresen describes at the end of the BIP how he’s concluded with this new proposal saying:

“In the short term, an increase is needed to continue to current economic policies with regards to fees and block space, matching market expectations and preventing market disruption. The limits on signature operations and amount of signature hashing done prevent possible CPU exhaustion attacks by “rogue miners” producing very expensive-to-validate two megabyte blocks.”

Will the Bitcoin protocol be forked soon? Time will tell if this plan reaches some consensus but its seems like some of the heated warfare is settling down. Bitcoin.com will make sure to keep our readers up to date on the latest developments concerning the block size.

After a blockchain fork, there are two branches– not two chains. Economic incentives are overwhelming for only stronger branch to survive — Gavin Andresen (@gavinandresen) January 25, 2016

What do you think of Gavin’s drafted BIP proposal? Let us know in the comments below.

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