| The original security model of bitcoins also assumes that: 1. Every network node participates in mining. So everybody is incentivized to keep, validate and forward the blocks they receive as quickly as possible. 2. Anybody should be able to bootstrap a network node and verify the entire blockchain from the genesis block without explicitly trusting any other node. Thus when a new block arrives one can independently verify it. #1 has not been the case for a few years since the advent of mining pools, whereas #2 might as well be a lost cause. The entire bitcoin blockchain sits at 330GB and counting, and the live UTXO database is rarely below 3GB. Hence people have argued against making the blocks larger as it could bloat the blockchain to the point that only people with very powerful computers could afford to validate the chain on their own. However with the status quo we are already seeing the number of network nodes stagnate around 10k since 2017 as running one is largely an altruistic effort. >But isn’t amount of data depend on tx count? No matter how big chunks you split them into, it’s the same bytes per minute in the end. Why hard limit at all? That is correct. You could also see the limit as putting a minimum cost for putting information on the chain and this could benefit the miners too. |