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Maximum block size?

BronzetankBronzetank Houston, TXMember Posts: 15 ✭
in Protocol and Client discussion
Will Ethereum launch with a maximum block size? This may not be defined yet, but is there even a ballpark number?

I am working on a project right now which requires the additional of a lot of tiny snippits of text to the blockchain which will sit in a name registry contract. I'm concerned with the number of transactions I require per block. These transactions cannot be combined and submitted because they will be coming from unique sources.

At what point will the number of transactions become impossible? 1,000 transactions per block? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000?

I realize that each transaction will take a minimal amount of ether to run, but what if money was no object because each source was responsible for their own transaction costs. Regardless of cost, when do I fill a block past capacity?

Thanks for your help.
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Comments

  • StephanTualStephanTual London, EnglandMember, Moderator Posts: 1,282 mod
    There's no block size limit in Mb, Ethereum is not Bitcoin :)

    However, the 'number' of contract calls and standard transactions is limited by the gas limit, which is 1.20x of the exponential moving average. So there's only so much gas that can be expended per block, even though it can grow, of course.

    The default gas limit per block on the testnet is 1B. On the livenet we tentatively are looking at 1M, again this is likely to change after our stress tests.

    Note that each call to the contract to the caller cost an amount of Ether defined by (gas sent to contract)*(price of gas as defined by caller) so sending 10,000 trx per block could end up quite a pricey endeavour.
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  • BronzetankBronzetank Houston, TXMember Posts: 15 ✭
    Thank you Stephen. This is exactly what I was looking for. The limit on growth is both encouraging and disheartening. Encouraging, because it may be possible to grow the block size sufficiently to what we need, but disheartening that it will start so low at the start. But I understand that stable growth is more important in the beginning.

    We realize that the numbers we are quoting are quite high for any blockchains in existence. In fact, we are having to pause the development of our project in order to make sure we can find a solution to this problem. We are OK with a cost per transaction up to $0.05, but any higher and it will become cost prohibitive. If anyone knows of a blockchain which can handle this kind of load right now, I would be very grateful for the heads up.
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  • ordoeordoe tehranMember Posts: 132 ✭✭
    The default block size limit is at around 89kB (3 million gas). Check out this thread:

    http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/1110/87
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