Co-founder of Block stream and one of the developers of Bitcoin Luke Tashir (Luke Dash jr) proposed to temporarily reduce the block size to 300 kilobytes to maintain network integrity and increase fees. He noted that he had already prepared a code to reduce the volume of the block.
The fact is that miners who mine blocks in the Bitcoin network and confirm transactions receive a small fee for confirming transactions. Recently, the commissions in the network of the first crypto currency have significantly decreased and reached the level of 2014, so it would be nice to increase the commissions a little to support miners.
Of course, miners also receive a reward for block detection, which at the moment is 12.5 BTC. However, every four years the reward is halved and, after another decline, many miners may leave the network because bitcoin mining will become unprofitable. And here too the increase of the commissions can help.
It is worth emphasizing that reducing the block size will help increase transaction fees, but on the other hand, will make the main problem of the Bitcoin network even more acute. We are talking about scalability – it is the small size of the block that caused the limited bandwidth of the network of the first crypto currency. On the other hand, this will lead to more frequent use of the Lightning Network and the SegWit Protocol.
Recall that, according to the resource transactionfee.info, the number of transactions in the Bitcoin network increased to the level of January 2018, when the rate of the first cryptocurrency reached $20,000.
