Oddbean

Good evening Plebs. Brace yourself. Ready? Are you sitting down comfortablely? Great. Here goes. I hate to say this but the thought crossed my mind and now I have to give it air. We all know Moore's law, right? Basically, computing processors get more powerful and cheaper at a breakneck rate, in layman's terms. Soooo...if the main worry for the Bitcoin network is decentralization which is plebs having the monetary means to run a node, doesn't that mean we CAN at some point increase limitations of the Bitcoin consensus protocol and still be ok? What level of affordability worldwide are we solving for? I realize people in the G7 countries can "afford" to run nodes much easier than say in emerging markets. Don't shoot. It's just a thought. I am ready to be schooled ;) #Bitcoin #asknostr #plebchain #nostr

I don't follow. If CPUs cheaper = Let's allow larger blocks? Increase difficulty? How is consensus a thing dependant on work? Also, how do we know the threshold at which you are excluding population? When it's more than the national salary of Zimbabwe or north Korea? Or do these don't matter. Legitimately confused. Please elaborate.

One needs to consider not only CPU, but also RAM, storage, and network infrastructure. While we may be able to adjust things like block size at some point in the not too near future, a more pressing need is determining a way to address the rate of growth of the utxo set and keep it within a manageable size of commodity hardware to ensure decentralization. Id be in favor of considering a softfork that imposed a constraint on sizes of outputs being valid such that no more than one of the outputs could not be conceivably spent on its own at the same fee rate of the transaction producing it.