Hardfork in Bitcoin Scalability Roadmap
A Bitcoin hardfork is coming. In a recent post to the Bitcoin Foundation's blog, Chief Scientist Gavin Andresen sketched out "one possible path for the behind-the-scenes technical work that is being done (or will need to get done) over the next few years to scale up Bitcoin." He proposed that the Bitcoin protocol would require a hardfork to implement an annual 50% increase in maximum block size. When Bitcoin first started off, there was technically an infinite maximum block size; though, Andresen mentions that the p2p protocol limited the block size to 32 mb. Following increased media....
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In just three days, Ethereum is to undertake the first of its kind hardfork in the digital currency space. With Geth, Parity and Mist all having a hardfork release, all eyes are now on the miners. Ethpool/Ethermine was the first to open the decision to miners with more than 81% voting in support of the hardfork on both pools. Dwarfpool, currently the biggest ethereum miner, followed, with more than 72% supporting the fork. Peter from Ethpool/Etherminer, speaking to CCN, stated: “[T]esting will start tomorrow and all mining nodes will be upgraded by Tuesday according to the result of the....
Ethereum’s community has reached a general understanding that the best way to move forward and address the month long dos of the network is a quick hardfork. A matter of urgency has been added following a recent backlog of more than 12,000 transactions and some miners opting in for zero transaction blocks. Gavin Wood, founder of Ethcore, maintainers of Parity, the second most used ethereum client, publicly stated yesterday: The EIP150.c1 hard fork is being targeted for Monday. We have a candidate branch and will be releasing a fork-ready client as soon as there are proper consensus tests.....
The blocksize debate has been brought to the forefront once more as a number of Bitcoin developers, including Gregory Maxwell, CTO of Blockstream and Mark Friedenbach, Core Tech Engineer at Blockstream, came out against the Hong Kong Consensus, arguably the most important document in Bitcoin’s history since the whitepaper. According to what may be a leak of an alleged meeting between pools and miners representing more than 75% of hashpower, consensus has been reached to hardfork to 2mb if Bitcoin Core developers do not release a new Bitcoin Core client with a 2MB hardfork code by August....
ViaBTC, which now controls around 15% of the network hashrate in combination with Roger Ver’s Bitcoin Unlimited pool, has called for a hardfork to upgrade bitcoin’s transaction capacity. “Drop the matter of SegWit, let’s hard fork together,” followed by a resounding no to the question of whether there is anything core could do to make ViaBTC support segwit, are just some of the public statements made by the new pool that has suddenly taken the fourth position in network hashrate distribution. I reached out to better understand the seemingly changing alignments in the great debate by asking....
Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, has laid out an incredibly ambitious roadmap with “unlimited” scalability within two years in a 43-page analysis of blockchain technology and its strength and weaknesses in a public or private setting. “The long term goal for Ethereum 2.0 and 3.0 is for the protocol to quite literally be able to maintain a blockchain capable of processing VISA-scale transaction levels, or even several orders of magnitude higher, using a network consisting of nothing but a sufficiently large set of users running nodes on consumer laptops.” The ambitious goal follows....