This is missing any mention that miners should not produce blocks larger than 1 MB until the network is known to be capable of handling it. This is critical for miners to understand before BIP 141 activates.

@luke-jr Do you know of a way to formulate that in a measurable way? How are miners expected to judge "the network known to be capable of handling it"? Also, BIP 141 won't activate in the release these notes are for.

When most miners are comfortable shutting off centralised relay networks and removing explicit outside addnode/connect to their nodes, that seems a reasonable indication that the network is ready.

Miners worked fine without centralised networks before. It's not like it's unreasonable.

@luke-jr What I think the right criterion is, is whether the additional propagation delay from a larger block size would not affect (or only in a negligable amount) the economics of running things like relay network, SPV mining, ... etc. And it may well be the case that compact blocks, better mempool logic, validation caching, ... bring us closer to that, as they make relay times less dependent on the block size, and more on validation time (for which block weight is probably a better measure, if UTXO growth is taken into account).

I don't think release notes are the place for this kind of discussion, though. Are you ok with just removing the language about discouraging/encouraging how people use these options, and simply state their existence?

Then we can see what effect the changes in the 0.13 release have on the network, and reassess whether any recommendations are needed in the first release that actually does a block size increase (through segwit)?

Updated to address comments.

I added a brief section on segwit to correct any confusion that somehow 0.13.0 supports segwit on mainnet. We should consider expanding that section to include more helpful notes on how to use 0.13.0 on testnet.

I'm fine with deferring any recommendations until segwit has been released for mainnet.

Thanks for writing this up @sdaftuar . Looks like a clear story, I'm just going to merge this, if anyone has suggested changes they can be made later.

@luke-jr The default is still max 750 kB (incurring the likely small performance loss), and this release does not have any means of increasing above 1 MB. The release notes simply explain the code changes.

But the release notes as currently written give incentive to take blockmaxsize and convert to blockmaxweight which can potentially produce blocks up to 3 MB once segwit is deployed.