29
votes
Accepted
Is SegWit a blocksize increase or more efficient use of blockspace?
Yes and no. It depends on how you frame the question.
It is a block size increase, because you can fit a larger number of
useful transactions into a block.
If you want to make a useful Bitcoin ...
- 29.2k
25
votes
Is there a difference between bytes and virtual bytes (vbytes)?
Yes, bytes and vbytes are referring to two different metrics: size and virtual size (vsize).
The size in [bytes] of a transaction refers to the raw byte length of its serialized format. It is used to ...
- 71.6k
17
votes
Accepted
What is "segregated witness" and how can it improve network scalability?
It's not a silver bullet solution, but it's a really good start.
As Gavin Andresen has said, Segregated Witness is a poor name. The 'segregated' part of the name is there to denote that there is ...
- 14k
15
votes
Accepted
With 100% segwit transactions, what would be the max number of transaction confirmation possible on a block?
Very interesting question, let's see what the smallest transaction we can build is. For it to be minimal it has to be a single input and a single output. The non-segwit part would look something like ...
- 9,309
10
votes
Is there a difference between bytes and virtual bytes (vbytes)?
For non-segwit transactions, vbytes = bytes.
With the implementation of SegWit, we now see the weight of the block/transactions rather than seeing the absolute size on the wire. While calculating the ...
- 7,298
8
votes
Accepted
Can a Bitcoin block be less than 1mb?
Yes. Let's calculate the minimum size of a block:
The block header must be exactly 80 bytes. This is the only part of the block that miners actually mine; the rest of the block is data that the ...
- 11.6k
7
votes
Accepted
How is the size of a block calculated?
The block size is the combination of the block header and the list of transactions. Specifically, the block header has these fields:
version - 4 bytes
previous block header hash - 32 bytes
merkle ...
- 7,729
7
votes
Why is the block size is not filled with transactions?
Miners pick transactions from the mempool which is the queue of unconfirmed transactions. When there are fewer transactions waiting than would fit into a block, the block will not be full. The miner ...
- 71.6k
6
votes
Accepted
Why does BIP141 define both virtual transaction size and weight?
The transaction limit under segwit is derived solely from the transaction weight and the block weight limit of 4,000,000 weight units.
Virtual transaction size was not used for the limit calculation ...
- 71.6k
6
votes
Arguments against Bitcoin using adaptive blocksizes
The strongest arguments against dynamic blocksizes which can be determined by miner actions, is that they do not necessarily represent the interests of other participants such as users, node operators,...
- 311
6
votes
Accepted
Would signature aggregation reduce the largest feasible blocksize
SegWit blocks aren't limited in bytes anymore but rather in weight. The maximum weight for a block is 4M. The weight of non-witness data is 4x its number of bytes.
So, yes, decreasing the amount of ...
- 6,325
6
votes
Accepted
Concept of Block weight and segwit are still unclear
Have a look: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/0000000000000000000cbbceb342e07071f9621607e044ec909aa86fcdf88e8a
Size = 1,158,038 bytes
Weight units = 3,992,825 WU
Now what does it mean? So the ...
- 1,064
5
votes
What is the number of transactions in a block?
The block size is limited to 1,000,000 bytes 4,000,000 weight units of data. Miners may arbitrarily decide from the available valid transactions which to include. The obvious selection policy would be ...
- 71.6k
5
votes
Cryptocurrency with small block size limit or large block time
I am not aware of any cryptocurrency that has block times of greater than 10 minutes, but I am very familiar with the desire to limit growth of the block chain.
Monero recently increased its block ...
- 379
5
votes
Accepted
Why can't Bitcoin use a very large blocksize such as 1GB?
If you made the block size that large, the rate of network divergence would increase drastically as more and more miners would find blocks while still transferring a block that someone else found. (...
- 51.3k
5
votes
Does the block size issue also apply to Dogecoin?
It has been discussed before, but you're right that the problem isn't nearly as big. There are a couple of reasons for this:
Dogecoin has the same blocksize limit as Bitcoin, but it has ten times as ...
- 29.2k
5
votes
Accepted
Is there any mechanism in Bitcoin that allows it to dynamically adapt to the flow of transactions?
Why is there a limit? Why don't we change it?
No matter the number of transactions broadcast to the network, there is an implicit maximum number of transactions that can be included in a block (see @...
- 17.9k
5
votes
Accepted
Was the lifting of the Taproot transaction size limit "accidental"? Why would ordinals want to fill a block with OP_RETURNs?
No it was not accidental, see the BIP342 section on Resource Limits
Script size limit: The maximum script size of 10000 bytes does not apply. Their size is only implicitly bounded by the block weight ...
- 4,922
4
votes
Accepted
Is there a (potential) "Blockchain size problem", and what solutions are available?
Currently, only full-nodes, i.e. nodes that have the complete blockchain inventorized relay blocks. Personally, I've recently encountered the first problem, when my Linux partition ran out of storage, ...
- 71.6k
4
votes
Accepted
What is block weight and how is it different from block size?
Block weight is defined in BIP 141 itself:
Block weight is defined as Base size * 3 + Total size. (rationale[3])
Base size is the block size in bytes with the original transaction
...
- 23k
4
votes
Accepted
Does Bitcoin Cash validate the fears about larger block sizes?
So have all the fears of larger block sizes come to bass with Bitcoin Cash?
I think most BTC proponents would say no, the fears have not passed. It is not a black/white situation in which a ...
- 17.9k
4
votes
Accepted
Why is the Litecoin blockchain smaller than the Bitcoin one?
Up until 2017, both BTC and LTC had 1 MB block limit. When SegWit was soft-forked into both protocols, the capacity increased to a hypothetical 4 MB blockweight limit.
But the limit doesn't mean ...
- 188
4
votes
Accepted
How are block interval, block size and effective throughput related?
First off, it is worth noting: this paper is not only talking about throughput in the 'transactions/second' sense, it is also addressing the effects of block size and interval on the network's latency ...
- 17.9k
4
votes
Accepted
Discrepancy in the blockchain size
1 MB was the maximum Bitcoin block size until 2017, not the size of each block. In the early years there were few transactions and most blocks were almost empty.
After the august 2017 segwit soft fork,...
- 862
4
votes
Determination of Block Size Limit
What happens if, for instance, a block's nonce is so large that the block's size exceeds the limit?
This post addresses the main question.
Don't think it is complete so I will append the following ...
- 15.3k
4
votes
Will the bitcoin blockchain eventually grow too large to be able to be run 'by anyone'?
There is a risk that the blockchain will continue to grow too quickly and become unwieldy, yes. However, if technology improvements continue at their current pace for several decades, and Bitcoin ...
- 1,160
3
votes
Minimum transaction fee to COMPLETE when mempool is +50 MB
I know that it increases probability as it ages. However many miners won't touch transactions at all, unless there's a fee attached, OR all the fee-based transactions have been satisfied. Correct?
As ...
- 71.6k
3
votes
Accepted
Does the 1 MB block size limit include the header?
CSizeComputer is a serialization stream that discards all data written, and just counts how many bytes were produced. It is inlined, and the compiler in most cases actually avoids computing the bytes.
...
- 99.1k
3
votes
What is the weight of a block that contains no pay-to-witness scripts?
From BIP 144: If the witness is empty, the old serialization format should be used.
It is illegal to encode a transaction using the extended serialization format if the witness is empty. Another way ...
- 99.1k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible