Bitcoin block size chart

Average Block Size

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It's well described how Bitcoin has a one Megabyte block limit; it's defined in the Bitcoin Core source code. Turns out that I was wrong; in practice this limit is actually quite a lot smaller! Back in " Bitcoin Traffic Bulletin " we saw how first transaction confirmation times were highly dependent on how full mined blocks were. There was a slight puzzle for me; the older data seemed more erratic than I'd have expected, but at the time I'd presumed that this was down to changes in hashing rates and that the older versions of the network had had longer latencies and more jittery propagation.

A couple of days ago, however, I bitcoin block size chart something very odd while watching a series of blocks block heights to ; they were all the same size kbytesbut that size wasn't anywhere near 1 Mbyte. The kbytes size seemed pretty bitcoin block size chart too, until I realized that this was a classic computer science numerology problem. The Bitcoin block size limit is 1, 1M bytes, but typically memory sizings aren't done in powers of 10, but instead in powers of 2, so 1 Mbyte of memory is actually bytes.

For anyone old enough to remember PC floppy drives I leave you to actually work out the capacity of a 1. Given this puzzle I generated some new data.

It bitcoin block size chart at the theoretical block usage vs the mean first confirmation time. Let's look at it:. Correlation and causation are two different things but, even so, this is pretty surprising! If our actual bitcoin block size chart block size limit was actually somewhat less than 1M bytes, though, the estimate block usage numbers would be incorrect and would need to be scaled up!

Why would k bytes be being used instead of 1M bytes? If one or more miner was systematically generating smaller blocks than the theoretical maximum then that bitcoin block size chart definitely affect all of my earlier estimates on block utilization, mean confirmation times and block scarcity for mining fees.

A little digging around in the Bitcoin Core git repository turns out to be very useful! The Bitcoin protocol implements a hard consensus limit of 1M bytes on blocks, but actually has a default size for miners that is actually smaller than this. Individual transaction selectors generally mining pool operators can set the value to anything up to 1M bytes, but there are some defaults.

A little more investigation also showed that v0. If we were mining, why might we want to use smaller block sizes? Well, if we need to announce a mined block to the network bitcoin block size chart takes time. If our miner had a DSL line with only a 1 Mbps uplink then by the time we've added network protocol overheads then this block will take about 20 seconds to transmit!

That's a very long time, especially in situations where two blocks are found at almost the same time. If the block had been 1M bytes then it would have taken 80 seconds! In practice large mining pools will have much faster network connections than this now, but network bandwidth still plays an effect. Back to our original problem, however! The problem with miners selecting a smaller maximum block size is that if the network is heavily loaded then our bitcoin block size chart is effectively leaving transactions waiting when they declare a block "full" at some level below 1M bytes.

Far from the 3. With good historical data we can estimate the actual block size limit for various miners. If we look at the largest block mined by specific pools in given weeks we can estimate the upper limits that they were actually using. If we multiply these by the fractions of the numbers of blocks each found then we can estimate the actual block size capacity of the network over time:. This isn't a perfect approach. Smaller pools will see their results skewed because they don't find enough blocks, but the effect is interesting.

Over the last two years the effective block size has steadily been growing, and if anything has, until a few months ago, slightly outpaced the growth in actual block usage. The raw data is also a source of some interesting discoveries.

Individual pool operators sometimes try to optimize things in interesting and quite different ways. Here are some examples for some of the larger pools:.

This is quite striking, even more so if we realize that in late and early we were seeing huge hash rate expansions which in turn reduce the confirmation times as blocks were being found much more quickly than one per 10 minutes. The implications of these results are intriguing.

We can certainly see that the current network can't actually handle even the modest transaction rates we originally assumed, although it's easy for mining pool operators to adjust for this. That this is up to the majority of mining pool operators is potentially the most interesting realization. In practice, such a bitcoin block size chart seems unlikely as that would damage bitcoin block size chart very ecosystem that supports mining.

A subtlety, however, is that GHash were only actually allowing k bytes per transaction. The jump when they switched to k byte transactions is actually quite marked in the second chart!

The confirmation time statistics suggest that even if, midthey had tried to use relative scarcity to select higher fee transactions it probably would have bitcoin block size chart little impact. The next large pool, if in a position to dictate block scarcity, has the potential to be much more disruptive as a result of transaction selection.

There bitcoin block size chart also an interesting implication for Gavin Andresen's proposed protocol fork that would allow larger blocks.

If the majority of mining pools by total capacity choose to ignore some new upper limit then the effect will be to retain a much smaller overall cap. Miners may, indeed, want to do exactly this as block scarcity is the only thing that has any reasonable prospect of helping them achieve higher transaction fees. For observers of the Bitcoin network we do seem to have a new health indicator: A periodic report on the mean, minimum and maximum block sizes mined by various pools and their associated statistical likelihoods could be very interesting.

After I spotted the trends that led me to speculate about block size limits he generated the raw data that Bitcoin block size chart needed to perform my analysis. The source code, and the source CSV data files can be found on github:

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Originally, Bitcoin's block size was limited by the number of database locks required to process it at most This limit was effectively around k in serialized bytes, and was forgotten until March.

He added it hidden in two commits [1] [2] [3] in secret. This limit was effectively a no-op due to the aforementioned forgotten limit. In March, the original lock limit was discovered by accident Bitcoin Core v0. After resolving the crisis, it was determined that since nobody knew of the limit, it was safe to assume there was consensus to remove it, and a hardfork removing the limit was scheduled and cleanly activated in May. From this point forward, the 1 MB limit became the effective limiting factor of the block size for the first time.

The limit was not changed again before and was believed to require a very invasive hard fork to change.

As transaction volume increased with widespread Bitcoin adoption, increasing the limit became subject to heavy debate in To prevent Bitcoin from temporarily or permanently splitting into separate payment networks "altcoins" , hard forks require adoption by nearly all economically active full nodes.

Satoshi and theymos immediately said not to implement it, as it would make the user's node incompatible with the network.

English, however, does not work that way. Satoshi spoke conditionally, not intentionally. Change block size limit based on miner votes, but don't leave the range 1MB, 32MB without a softfork or hardfork respectively. The final solution deployed was Segwit, increasing the block size limit to MB without a hardfork.

Positions below are based on a suggested fixed block size increase to 20MiB. Scalability FAQ Originally, Bitcoin's block size was limited by the number of database locks required to process it at most PATCH increase block size limit Don't use this patch" Satoshi explains here that if a change is necessary, a hard fork could be implemented with a countdown.

Retrieved from " https: Navigation menu Personal tools Create account Log in. Views Read View source View history. Sister projects Essays Source. This page was last edited on 5 May , at Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution 3. Privacy policy About Bitcoin Wiki Disclaimers. No "At this time, I oppose increasing the block size limit as per Gavin's proposal" - Nadav Ivgi founder [14]. But if Bitcoin users want to be a payment system, then up it must go.

But we cannot handle 20 MB blocks right now. I think we can accept 5MB block at most. Yes "Agreed but optimistic this will be the last and only time block size needs to increase " - CEO Stephen Pair [23].

Yes "And I'm in favor of releasing a version with this change even with opposition. Yes "It is time to increase the block size. Increase the block size.

Yes "Needs to happen, but needs future expansion built in at a reasonable rate. Yes "We see Bitcoin XT as the best solution for ensuring the future scalability of the Bitcoin network.

Changing a constant is not the hard-part. The hard part is validating a plan and the other factors that go into it. No one will thank us if we "scale" bitcoin but break it in hard to recover ways at the same time. No "I strongly urge that we return to the existing collaborative constructive review process that has been used for the last 4 years which is a consensus by design to prevent one rogue person from inserting a backdoor, or lobbying for a favoured change on behalf of a special interest group, or working for bad actor" - Dr.

Yes " Kryptoradio dev zouppen supports 20MB block size in bitcoin. Yes "Gavin is right. The time to increase the block size limit is before transaction processing shows congestion problems.

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