Crypto News: Satoshi’s Best Kept Secret: Why is There a 1 MB Limit to Bitcoin Block Size

Anybody familiar with Bitcoin is aware of the vexing problem caused by the 1 MB blocksize limit and the controversy that arose over how to scale the network. It’s probably worthwhile to look back on how that limit came to exist, in hopes that future crises can be averted by a solid understanding of the past.

In 2010, when the blocksize limit was introduced, Bitcoin was radically different than today. Theymos, administrator of both the Bitcointalk forum and /r/bitcoin subreddit, said, among other things:

• "No one anticipated pool mining, so we considered all miners to be full nodes and almost all full nodes to be miners.
  
• I didn't anticipate ASICs, which cause too much mining centralization.
  
• SPV is weaker than I thought. In reality, without the vast majority of the economy running full nodes, miners have every incentive to collude to break the network's rules in their favor.
  
• The fee market doesn't actually work as I described and as Satoshi intended for economic reasons that take a few paragraphs to explain."
  

It seems that late in 2010, Satoshi realized there had to be a maximum block size, otherwise some miners might produce bigger blocks than other miners were willing to accept, and the chain could split. Therefore, Satoshi inserted a 1 MB limit into the code.

And he kept it a secret.

Full story at http://bit.ly/2w8v1GV

Source: CoinTelegraph

 

 

 

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