I've proposed this hard fork approach last year in Hong Kong Consensus but immediately rejected by coredevs at that meeting, after more than one year it seems that lots of people haven't heard of it. So I would post this here again for comment.
The basic idea is, as many of us agree, hard fork is risky and should be well prepared. We need a long time to deploy it. Despite spam tx on the network, the block capacity is approaching its limit, and we must think ahead. Shall we code a patch right now, to remove the block size limit of 1MB, but not activate it until far in the future. I would propose to remove the 1MB limit at the next block halving in spring 2020, only limit the block size to 32MiB which is the maximum size the current p2p protocol allows. This patch must be in the immediate next release of Bitcoin Core. With this patch in core's next release, Bitcoin works just as before, no fork will ever occur, until spring 2020. But everyone knows there will be a fork scheduled. Third party services, libraries, wallets and exchanges will have enough time to prepare for it over the next three years. We don't yet have an agreement on how to increase the block size limit. There have been many proposals over the past years, like BIP100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 148, 248, BU, and so on. These hard fork proposals, with this patch already in Core's release, they all become soft fork. We'll have enough time to discuss all these proposals and decide which one to go. Take an example, if we choose to fork to only 2MB, since 32MiB already scheduled, reduce it from 32MiB to 2MB will be a soft fork. Anyway, we must code something right now, before it becomes too late. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
