Bigger Blocks Mean More Decentralization for Bitcoin
Recently there has been an uproar in the Bitcoin community over a potential increase the Bitcoin block size. There are many people I respect deeply on both sides of this issue, but unfortunately we’ve seen some members of the community resorting to outright censorship in order to stop the debate. Censorship is never the answer. The reason myself and many....
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Jim Burton, the British lead developer of "lightweight" Bitcoin client MultiBit, favors a rapid block-size increase in order to allow for more transactions on the network, rather than focusing on layers built on top of Bitcoin. "Philosophically, we think that Satoshi's vision of a peer-to-peer currency needs bigger blocks," Burton told Bitcoin Magazine. We want people to be able to transact person-to-person 'on-chain'. We are starting to see large transaction backlogs, for instance recently on Black Friday, so the need for bigger blocks is clear." The block-size dispute - which represents....
Bitcoin requires decentralization of miners (or mining pools) and full nodes to achieve what some consider its core property: censorship resistance. As such, the block-size dispute represents a trade-off. Bigger blocks allow for more transactions on the Bitcoin network, but take more time to propagate, favoring larger miners and pools, while the increased data transmission disincentivizes users to run full nodes. Fortunately, there are proposals to increase Bitcoin's efficiency that reduce the risk of bigger blocks. One of the most promising innovations in this regard, are Invertible Bloom....
(Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in August of 2015 and was immediately censored from /r/Bitcoin and several other places. The version below has been updated to recommend support for Bitcoin Unlimited.) Recently there has been an uproar in the Bitcoin community over a potential increase of the Bitcoin block size. There are many people....
F2Pool, the world's largest Bitcoin mining pool, maintains that changing its code to allow bigger blocks through BIP 101 or Bitcoin XT is not an option. Wang Chun, the operator of the China-based pool controlling some 20 percent of hashing power, dismissed the idea of an exponential growth rate of the maximum block size for 20 years leading to 8-gigabyte blocks. Asked by Bitcoin Magazine, Chun said: "We cannot predict what will happen years into the future, and we think a first step to 2 megabytes should be enough for now." The block-size dispute - which represents a tradeoff between....
Leading bitcoin startups including BitPay, Blockchain.info, Circle, KnCMiner, Bitnet, Xapo and BitGo have come to a consensus to implement Gavin Andresen's BIP 101, and to expand the current block size to 8 megabytes, after a long discussion with core developers, miners and the companies' technical teams. A statement of their support was posted on the Blockchain.info blog today signed by Stephen Pair, Peter Smith, Jeremy Allaire, Sean Neville, Sam Cole, John McDonnell, Wences Casares and Mike Belshe. "We support the implementation of BIP101," the companies say in the letter. "We have found....