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bitcoin is experiencing mass gross. Even some local businesses around me are starting to accept bitcoin payments. Of coarse, with new growth availability problems arise; and one is the slow and high transaction fees.

It seems the reason to this is because there is only one block every 10 minutes, and each have a 2mb size limit. Why is this? Why don't we remove the size limit? It sounds like a simple problem that has a easy solution. Wouldent miners make more coins from the extra fees from the extra transactions in each block? What our are other solutions?

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marked as duplicate by Nate Eldredge, Andrew Chow♦, sr-gi, Jestin, Pieter Wuille Oct 20 '17 at 21:06

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    Remove the block limit today, and tomorrow someone will mine a block that is 500 TB. Have fun storing / relaying / verifying that, all you full nodes out there. – Nate Eldredge Oct 20 '17 at 14:16
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(Actually that's a deep, political question, but I'll answer it neutrally)

Why is this? Why don't we remove the size limit?

As Nate Elredge said, miners can create free transactions. RIP Blockchain. The limit also protects the blockchain from spam attacks - the dust transactions stay in the mempool.

It sounds like a simple problem that has a easy solution

Hard forks. It may take until forever to wait for people upgrading their nodes compatible with the HF. Also SegWit is a clever trick: "block size increase as a soft fork". In the future, the witness blocks' size can be increased so that Bitcoin won't need a block size increase anymore. (Actually this needs another complex trick, like SegWit)

Wouldn't miners make more coins from the extra fees from the extra transactions in each block?

Nope. If blocks were bigger, the users would set lower fees and the miners would earn the same.

What our are other solutions?

Schnorr. A signature system that is much more size (bytes) efficient. This would require a hard fork (or another soft-fork trick), but would work. Or as I said above, a newer version of SegWit that increases witness block size. Or maybe FlexTrans, a compressed transaction format (It looks like Bitcoin won't have it.) Or the most likely one: Layer two solutions: Lightning network, Liquid... They'll allow low fee instant payments, while keeping blockchain size low.

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  • hm, interesting post. I like the abstract ideas you shared. – Callerap Oct 20 '17 at 15:02
  • Signatures take up a large portion of the transaction data, but the rest of the data still has to fit in the 1mb limit, right? So, it looks to me like there is a upper bound on how much you can increase the size limit of the witness data. – surjikal Mar 18 '18 at 21:49
  • @surjikal Exactly! There's no difference between 1 MB + 20 MB Witness and 1 MB + 40 MB Witness. Even worse, SegWit will be inefficient when Shnorr comes. More information on deadalnix.me/2017/02/27/… under the title of "Schnorr signatures will provide addition capacity" – MCCCS Mar 19 '18 at 4:23

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