Smooth Sailing for Altcoins Through Bitcoin’s Block Size Limit Problems
Last month, prompted by his inability to raise the block size limit from 1MB to 2MB, Bitcoin Core developer, Mike Hearn, abandoned Bitcoin altogether and declared the cryptocurrency to be a failed experiment. The price of Bitcoin quickly fell from about $420 per coin to slightly above $360, and now has re-stabilized close to its original price before Hearn’s article. Bitcoin and altcoin prices less correlated. CoinTelegraph spoke to representatives of several other cryptocurrencies to gauge if they had been affected by the challenges Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency standard bearer, has been....
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Fresh out of jail on bail for embezzlement, disgraced Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles poked fun at the Bitcoin community’s for their lack of resolution in the block size limit issue. Karpeles, in a tweet sent shortly after his release from jail, expressed his detachment from and disdain for the current state of Bitcoin, including a jab at the persisting one-megabyte block size limit debate: Block size limit still an issue, though drama has died down. The issue of whether or not to raise Bitcoin’s block size limit is a contentious one, responsible for a “splinter subreddit,” /r/btc, to emerge....
This week, bitcoin Jesus Roger Ver weighed in on the block size debate stating that the block size limit should be increased if it is technologically achievable. Specifically, Ver tweeted: The block size debate has been underway for some time now and a lot of developers including Bitcoin Core Developers and the Bitcoin community are getting exasperated with the current impasse. In addition, many developers are now spending a lot of time and money seeking alternative solutions. If every 1MB block were always full, it would take over 55 years to fill my new HD. Let's raise the block size....
Bitcoin Classic, a fork of Bitcoin with a doubled two-megabyte block size limit, appears to have failed. Now, many in the Bitcoin community have voiced fears that, with a continued one-megabyte limit, transaction confirmation times and fees will increase to the point where Bitcoin itself is untenable, potentially dooming the cryptocurrency. However, Steven Zeiler, Software Architect at Zen Software and former software architect for Ripple, holds a different view. He feels that the block size limit is at present a non-issue, and that the Bitcoin economy continues to work relatively....
In this article I will explain how the size of Bitcoin blocks is determined in the absence of an arbitrary size limit. Oleg has already written an excellent post on this topic, but I have a few things to add and I wish to relate the discussion to the current debate over increasing the block size. If the maximum limit on block size is removed, it is not the case that blocks will simply grow without limit. There is a natural size that is determined by the market. The block size will change until the marginal revenue of adding more transactions approaches the marginal cost; this could happen....
Bitcoin Classic is the latest attempt to increase Bitcoin’s block size limit via a hard fork initiated by miners running an alternative to Bitcoin Core, but it appears that the relatively new software client may already be on its last legs. According to various sources familiar with a meeting in Beijing on March 30, supporters of an increase to the Bitcoin block size limit were unable to convince the Chinese mining community to implement BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) 109 without support from Bitcoin Core contributors. It was the intention of some participants to convince the Chinese....