Bitcoin’s First 1.6MB Block Has Been Mined

For the first time ever, a 1.6MB bitcoin
block was mined yesterday by a small
pool called Bitcoin India which
currently handles just 0.2% of network
hashrate.
Block 493,182 contained 833
transactions with 11,073 inputs and
outputs, transfering nearly $50 million
worth of bitcoins for a considerable fee
of $5,600.
Bitcoin’s biggest block so far.
The average bitcoin blocksize has gone
slightly down yesterday to 1.03MB from
1.04MB. The above block, therefore,
might be an exception with Jonathan
Toomim stating:
“As with previous instances of large
blocks, almost all of this block’s space
was taken up by one entity. This entity
sent 36 large (33.7 kB) multisig
transactions, each of which had 201
inputs and one output.
The following block had 14 of these
33.7 kB multisig transactions. All told,
that’s 1685 kB in 50 transactions from a
single entity. This is likely the same
entity that caused the previous bursts
of large blocks.”
In effect it appears there is an entity
that is heavily using segwit. Thus
making the above transactions to
presumably save on fees.
But now that we are seeing these
slightly bigger blocks, claims are being
made that segwit’s method of
increasing capacity is actually very
inefficient.
In comparing some numbers the 1.6MB
block had:
Block size: 1602023
Number of transactions: 833
Input count + Output count: 11073
Bytes per IO address: 144
While a random non-segwit block
(483,182) had:
Block size: 999931
Number of transactions: 2110
Input count + Output count: 10574
Bytes per IO address: 95
The segwit block, therefore, which is
near the practical limit of bitcoin’s
current blocksize rules, was able to
handle only 500 more inputs and
outputs out of some 11,000. Making it
an increase of just 5%, instead of 50%
as would be the case for a non-segwit
1.6MB block.
That may be because segwit blocks
require more complex transactions that
need far more space than non-segwit
blocks. Which might translate to bitcoin
gaining no, or very minimal, on-chain
capacity through segwit.
Which may be shown by the fact fees
have reached $5 per transaction
recently while the network remains
congested as its capacity continues to
be very limited with it all operating at a
dial-up, or worse, level.