A lead developer for bitcoin cash has questioned whether the cryptocurrency’s network should process blocks larger than 2MB.
Block Size Debate
According to posts published to Reddit on Sept. 2, BCH developer Amaury Sechet responded to criticism from community members over pools and miners limiting the network to 2MB transactions.
Sechet, who goes by the user name /u/deadalnix, said,
“It's not shameful, there is not actual demand for anywhere close to 2MB.”
Some argued that the 2MB network was inadequate for the proper function of bitcoin cash, and that it allowed for potential disruption of the blockchain due to the lower transaction fees of BCH compared to BTC. In particular, users voiced their frustration with network congestion, which some believe would be eliminated by increasing the 2MB limit.
Sechet responded,
“Sure or we can mine large block, so we move the problem from the mempool to indexing node that fill trip over themselves bsv style as they are not optimized to handle 100x the usual demand.”Or we can solve the problem rather than trading it against another.”
Sechet reiterated that, despite network congestion, demand on BCH’s network is still not high enough to warrant overhauling the block size,
“Actual demand being way bellow 2MB, unless demand increased by two orders of magnitude overnight. So 2MB is plenty enough for thing to go through smoothly given proper mempool management.”
The BCH developer also explained that simply increasing the block size would result in a tradeoff of other problems for bitcoin cash users and their wallets,
“No, but it prevent the abuse of other resources. If we continuously pump 32MB blocks for instance, a good chunk of all wallet backend will die, because they are not provisioned to handle a 300x load increase overnight (nor should they be expected to). You are just trading bad stuff against each others.”
