Over the past 24 hours, I have been discussing with many people in the community about the issue surrounding new accounts not having sufficient bandwidth to fully interact with the blockchain. There is a full discussion in this post.
Based on the discussion and feedback, I have decided to update my witness parameter maximum_block_size to 131072.
Changing the max block size from 65536 to 131072 will double the amount of bandwidth that users are given. This should allow all accounts that are created with the current account creation fee (6 STEEM) to fully interact with the blockchain without running into bandwidth limitations (assuming they are not using the system excessively).
My main concern over increasing it to 131072 was that it could allow the size of the blockchain to grow significantly faster. According to @roadscape the current blocks are not that large, so he does not expect it to have much of an impact based on the current usage. @liberosist also pointed out that prior to hardfork 16, 131072was the default value set by the witnesses - so it has been this high before.
I know that there are people smarter than me regarding this, so if anyone raises serious concerns about having this set to 131072, I will reconsider my policy. Based on all of the feedback I have been given though, this seems like the best choice.
I encourage the other witnesses to update their values to 131072 as well, so that the median maximum_block_size is updated to reflect the change.
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