Block size and scalability

Technology
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How is ZCash going to handle the questions of scalability, specifically block size?

I found some old posts about this, basically saying that the devs will handle this problem later. Will that be easy to do, or will we find ourselves in a similar situation to Bitcoin in 5 years time, trying to implement a controversial hard fork that the miners don’t like?

What lessons can be drawn from Bitcoin in regards to this? How will the same fate be avoided?

I’ve been following the development of ZCash / zerocoin for years now, and I think this is incredibly important work. I’m in awe of you guys! I really want to see this coin succeed.

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There was a hardfork between the z5 and z6 releases that took the Zcash blocksize from 1MB to 2MB.

I don’t follow bitcoin closely enough but I’ve long assumed that part of the reason bitcoin has eschewed bigger blocks is that it would obsolete certain otherwise current generations of mining hardware that have been designed around 1MB blocks before they’ve either paid for themselves or been able to generate the projected profit.

For as long as Zcash mining remains free of such hardware constraints, I doubt that particular kind of hardfork will be cause controversy.

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[quote=“Voluntary, post:2, topic:1036, full:true”]current generations of mining hardware that have been designed around 1MB blocks
[/quote]

seems like you’re misinformed, ASIC miner does not depend on a certain blocksize. Current debate on Bitcoin is how to massively scale the network, not just a trivial increase to 2MB limit. Two approaches are either using second trustless layer such as Lightning/Thunder to keep main chain decentralized; or prioritizing main chain transactions by inflating blocksize heavily.

Currently Zcash is testing 2MB blocksize every 2.5 minutes. However private Zcash transaction has much larger size than Bitcoin transaction, so having bigger and faster blocks does not mean Zcash will have higher throughput than Bitcoin.

I know it is too soon to talk about massive scalability for Zcash at the moment but i still want to know the opinion of Zcash team on the long term scaling solutions. Lightning Network (which utilize multisig transaction) seems not to be applicable for Zcash’s JoinSplit. I think the only option left for Zcash in foreseeable future would be increasing max block size.

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There’s a blog post coming up soon that will address that question (private payment channels).

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Will Zcash allow hardfork like Ethereum or Zchain will be an immutable one like Bitcoin?

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How will Zcash address this problem in the future? Right now we have a blocksize of 2MB. BCH is 32MB. Will we need to eventually consider raising the blocksize to keep fees low?

I saw this post from daria about scaling via zk rollups…is this an alternative to raising blocksize?

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An other problem is transaction censorhsip along with Largest Ethereum miner, Ethermine, stops processing sanctioned transactions. The requirement to have >3Tb of cutting edge ꜱꜱᴅ storage for Ethereum is driving out users and they take weeks to build.

At some point, it becomes too costly to run a node and the entire network is controlled by compliant companies.

By contrast, you can run a full Bitcoin node on your phone (~450Gb) thanks to the low block limit.

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