Block Size: Bitcoin Does Not Scale Effectively
This weekend's official XT release was made under pretense that a bigger block size will supposedly increase Bitcoin's capacity and allow more transactions per second, cheaper fees and wider adoption. So why had the decision caused so much controversy and why didn't the Core developers just implement it already? We all want a large scale Bitcoin with maximum participation, don't we? As it turns out, the XT developers are not telling the whole truth and are knowingly putting Bitcoin's future on the line. Disclaimer: The information presented in this article is intended to be informational....
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Bitcoin does not need to scale. While Satoshi Nakamoto might have arbitrarily designed a 1MB block size into the Bitcoin protocol with little explanation, many industry people forget that, just because that amount was arbitrary, does not mean the protocol must scale now or ever. The people who feel this way – in what essentially represents a conservative approach to the debate – have been shunned completely in the discussion known as the Bitcoin block size debate. Not scaling is not an option. This is a great error as it obfuscates the real debate at hand. The reality is many Bitcoiners....
Bitcoin Unlimited takes off as Core blocks mined drop below 90% for the first time, indicating that Bitcoin may be forked, increasing the block size limit. Attempts to raise the block size limit have been made in the past, the latest of which before Unlimited, Bitcoin Classic, reached 70 blocks per 1,000 at its height before slowly declining. This month, Bitcoin Unlimited, which would allow the block size to be increased, took off, fast approaching 10% of Bitcoin blocks mined per thousand. Added to Classic’s roughly 30 (and declining) blocks and Core’s block share has dipped below 880.....
On January 24, the Bitcoin blockchain transaction queue was significantly backed up with unconfirmed transactions. At the peak of the backlog, the mempool showed over 67 thousand unconfirmed transactions. Following this event Bitcoin developer Lukejr has revealed his latest Github BIP proposal asking to lower the block size even more. After a Day of....
/u/dpinna submitted a technical paper on the Bitcoin Subreddit to the dev-list which outlines the advantages gained by increasing block sizes. It is well known that block size has been a matter of debate for quite a while, and Bitcoin users on both sides of the argument are very passionate. /u/dpinna’s paper outlines how miner advantages actually scale up with network and mempool properties in the scenario of uncapped block sizes. Taking inspiration from uPeter__R ‘s work, /u/dpinna further explains (through evidence and mathematical models) how miners receive more benefit from scaling....
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....