# Gavin Andresen
# 2012-07-27 23:48:43
# https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=96097.msg1059475#msg1059475

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Good question. @p{par}

In my humble opinion, the block size should not be arbitrarily limited as it is now (1MB is the limit; typical blocks these days are 30-250K big), but should 'float' @p{--} miners should collectively decide how large a block they're willing to validate and build on top of. @p{par}

Obviously a miner wants to include as many fee-paying transactions in their blocks as possible, until the fee paid is less than their cost of validating and including the transaction (which is a small cost). @p{par}

But miners also don't want to spend a very long time validating other miners' blocks, so they have an incentive to ignore blocks that are outrageously big. If they @p{(it}were@p{it)} willing to build on a 10-gigabyte-big block that took ten minutes to download and signature check, then they're shooting themselves in the foot@p{--} an evil miner could mine a huge block, and then get a head start on mining the next block while the rest of the network was busy validating it. @p{par}

BUT: moving to a floating maximum block size determined by miners will be really hard; it will require everybody@p{--} merchants and miners and users@p{--} to upgrade. It may never happen, because other ways of supporting very high transaction volumes might develop before then.