I agree that the historical reasons are irrelevant from an engineering 
perspective. But they still set a context for the discussion…and might help 
shed some insight into the motivations behind some of the participants. It’s 
also good to know these things to counter arguments that start with “But 
Satoshi said that…”

What’s critically important to note is that several of the assumptions that 
were being made at the time this limit was decided have turned out wrong…and 
that these other issues should probably be of greater concern and more highly 
prioritized in any discussion considering the merits of deploying potentially 
incompatible consensus rule changes. It seems if these other issues were fixed 
perhaps no block size limit would be required at all (as was originally hoped).

- Eric

> On Jul 28, 2015, at 5:46 PM, Mark Friedenbach <m...@friedenbach.org> wrote:
> 
> Does it matter even in the slightest why the block size limit was put in 
> place? It does not. Bitcoin is a decentralized payment network, and the 
> relationship between utility (block size) and decentralization is empirical. 
> Why the 1MB limit was put in place at the time might be a historically 
> interesting question, but it bears little relevance to the present 
> engineering issues.
> 
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 5:43 PM, Jean-Paul Kogelman via bitcoin-dev 
> <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org 
> <mailto:bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>> wrote:
> 
> > Enter a “temporary” anti-spam measure - a one megabyte block size limit. 
> > Let’s test this out, then increase it once we see how things work. So far 
> > so good…
> >
> 
> The block size limit was put in place as an anti-DoS measure (monster 
> blocks), not "anti-spam". It was never intended to have any economic effect, 
> not on spam and not on any future fee market.
> 
> 
> jp
> 
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org 
> <mailto:bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev 
> <https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev>
> 

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail

_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev

Reply via email to