Bitcoin developers: Increasing Bitcoin block size will affect bandwidth-limited validators

For the past few years, Bitcoin block size has been the focus of discussions in the Bitcoin community. Due to the divergence of opinions of some important supporters, which ultimately led to the birth of different assets, the Bitcoin ecosystem is still divided on the issue of the ideal block size.

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Major Bitcoin Core developers tend not to do anything about the current Bitcoin block size, and Clark Moody, the founder of Dashboard, recently expressed his views on the debate over the size of Bitcoin blocks.

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Moody's recently stated on Stephen Livera's podcast that although hard disk space on the market is cheap, the impact of increasing the size of Bitcoin blocks must be viewed from a global perspective. He believes that if the block is too large, some validators may not be able to keep up.

A major problem with increasing block size is that some nodes or validators with limited bandwidth will not be able to keep up with this change. To operate at a certain speed, the limited bandwidth basically constitutes a limitation, and it varies with different geographical locations. He went on to point out that in some countries, the cost of increasing the bandwidth value can be high, and verifying blocks requires more resources. Moody's also added:

"If you can't verify every block on average in 10 minutes, or download blocks and verify them in 10 minutes, you will be left behind overall, and if the changes continue to roll forward, you will never really catch up . "

In early 2019, independent Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr also proposed to reduce the current 1 MB block size of Bitcoin to 300 KB in order to make it easier for users to run a Bitcoin network. Full node.

Proponents of increasing the block size of Bitcoin generally believe that in order to increase the scalability of Bitcoin and increase the number of transactions per second, the block size must be changed. These proponents also believe that off-chain solutions like Lightning are currently unable to reduce the load on the Bitcoin main chain.

However, the main disadvantage of larger blocks is that it can harm the decentralized spirit of Bitcoin. Larger blocks will make the cost of running a full node very high, resulting in fewer validators running a full node. Users with more computing power will likely form a centralized entity, which may eventually weaken Bitcoin's value proposition as a decentralized network.

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