Are Blocks Filling up, and Is That a Problem?
With the recent spike in bitcoin's exchange rate, there has been a surge in transaction volume on the Bitcoin network, too. And while most in the Bitcoin community welcome the significant uptrend, some have also expressed concern. This might be the first "Bitcoin boom" to be influenced by the 1 megabyte maximum block size, which limits the number of....
Related News
The Bitcoin community has a new problem to solve; the latest problem to hit digital currency is a double spending bug affecting Bitcoin wallets. The problem was discovered on 4 July as many Americans were busy celebrating Independence Day. Some Bitcoin miners are now generating invalid blocks, making it impossible to guarantee that currency can't be spent more than once. The Bitcoin Foundation assures users that all transactions confirmed by 15:00 on 4 July are safe. Double spending is supposed to be avoided by the Bitcoin protocol itself, which checks the block chain to check if any given....
Multiple versions of the bitcoin client began failing this week, after a rogue transaction stopped users from restarting the software. The problems first surfaced early Monday morning US time, with a message on the Bitcoin Talk forum. "Just opened my laptop and started Bitcoin QT and received the message blockchain corrupt, I clicked OK and now it appears "Reindexing blocks - 204 weeks," said the poster. "Also, my Bitcoins are Unconfirmed. What happened, why the message?" Others quickly reported the same error on multiple computers, running different versions of Bitcoin-QT, which is the....
The number of transactions on the Bitcoin network has steadily increased over the years. This means more blocks are filling up. And as not all transactions can be included in the blockchain straight away, backlogs form in miners’ “mempools” (a sort of “transaction queue.”) Miners typically pick the transactions that pay the most fees and include these in their blocks first. Transactions that include lower fees are “outbid” on the so called “fee market,” and remain in miners’ mempools until a new block is found. If the transaction is outbid again, it has to wait until the next block. This....
Bitcoin Core 0.13.0, the thirteenth generation of Bitcoin's reference client as first launched by Satoshi Nakamoto almost eight years ago, has now been tagged for release. This is one of the final steps in the software release process and initiates the Gitian build process. Bitcoin Core 0.13.0 was developed by some 100 contributors over a period of about five months. And while much of the development effort over this time has also been focused on Segregated Witness, which will be activated only in a future minor release of the software, Bitcoin Core 0.13.0 includes about a dozen notable....
Blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain have a maximum size of 1 MB. Proof of work difficulty is calibrated so 1 block is created every 10 minutes. It is generally accepted a miner would want to maximise the number of transactions it includes in a block as it collects the transaction fees. Logically, with the growing popularity of Bitcoin, the average block size is getting closer to its limit. In this environment, it is surprising to see a number of empty blocks being mined. An empty block is not entirely empty, it has 1 transaction : the coinbase transaction which allocates the mining reward to....