monero-site/resources/moneropedia/scalability.md

layout	entry	terms	summary
moneropedia	Scalability	scalability	Growth potential of Monero, resources required, and methods of increasing efficiency

The Basics

Monero has no hardcoded maximum block size, which means that unlike Bitcoin it does not have a 1 MB block size limit preventing scaling. However, a block reward penalty mechanism is built into the protocol to avoid a too excessive block size increase: The new block's size (NBS) is compared to the median size M100 of the last 100 blocks. If NBS>M100, the block reward gets reduced in quadratic dependency of how much NBS exceeds M100. E.g. if NBS is [10%, 50%, 80%, 100%] greater than M100, the nominal block reward gets reduced by [1%, 25%, 64%, 100%]. Generally, blocks greater than 2*M100 are not allowed, and blocks <= 60kB are always free of any block reward penalties.