An Anatomy of Bitcoin's Great Scaling Debate
Bitcoin's scaling debate is clearly one of its defining moments. It has pitted the user bases sharply against one another whether through endless Reddit debates, digital media or even at the "top" tier of the development teams. It also raised significant issues around centralization and bitcoin’s somewhat awkward relationship with the mostly China-based mining industry. In this post, I will attempt to document different parts of the debate as it played out from different perspectives. I do not consider myself beholden to any specific strand and have attempted to be as neutral as....
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It has been almost a year since the Great Bitcoin Debate, which unleashed Bitcoin’s civil war, was brought to public attention. Now, a year later, an unofficial truce seems to have been reached with bitcoin’s potential crypto competitors, such as Ethereum, and potential competition from numerous bank sponsored consortiums focusing attention once again on making bitcoin great and appealing to all. The Great Bitcoin Debate began with a series of posts by Gavin Andresen in Spring 2015 which argued for an increase in transaction capacity due to estimates that the limit of approximately 200,000....
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....
Following a months-long debate on how best to scale the bitcoin network to accommodate a greater number of transactions, bitcoin mining firms are voicing their support for a newly introduced proposal called Bitcoin Classic. Though a new entrant to the debate, Bitcoin Classic so far has the support of bitcoin developers including former Bitcoin Core maintainer Gavin Andresen, Bloq CEO Jeff Garzik and Ledger Journal editor Peter Rizun, among others. If adopted, Bitcoin Classic would increase the size of blocks on the bitcoin blockchain to 2MB, up from 1MB today. The proposal has created....
The prolonged scaling issue has turned into what some have been calling bitcoin's existential crisis. As proposals for alternative solutions to Bitcoin Core’s roadmap were put forward and Bitcoin Classic gained traction, the divergence in technical approach has devolved into a heated debate. Emotionally charged disputes on Reddit and Twitter with censorship and personal attacks have divided the community. This split over the protocol harkens back to differences in views that arose at the onset of this technology between economists and those with computer science backgrounds. The former....
In bitcoin's early days, discussion of the protocol was almost the only thing that mattered – and 2016, it could be said, has brought this discussion back to center stage. The reason has been the continued focus on network scalability, more specifically whether modifying bitcoin's block size is the right way to increase the number of transactions the network can process. It's important to note that to some, the continued "debate" isn't really a debate at all. As evidenced at the technology's annual developer summit, there remains a strong (if not overwhelming) consensus that a....