A Closer Look at Bitcoin Unlimited’s Configurable Block Size Proposal

Bitcoin Unlimited, one of the Bitcoin Core software forks introduced in late 2015, garnered much attention in recent months. The project gained hash power support from several new Bitcoin mining pools, including ViaBTC, GBMiners and BTC.TOP, while node adoption appears to be on the rise as well. The central idea behind Bitcoin Unlimited — specified in “Bitcoin Unlimited Improvement Proposal 001” (BUIP001) — is to hand control of Bitcoin’s block size limit to users and miners. Or perhaps, more accurately, to make this control more explicit and easier to handle. However, this control does....

The block-size limit debate has taken a turn now that some of Bitcoin's biggest mining pools are publicly endorsing BIP 100 (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 100) instead of backing a Bitcoin XT blockchain fork. So far, F2Pool, BTCChina, BitFury, KnCMiner, 21 Inc. and several smaller pools have come out in support of this alternative proposal. Combined, this represents well over half of all hashing power on the Bitcoin network. While these endorsements are just a show of support, and do not trigger a change of the block-size limit or a blockchain hard fork as Bitcoin XT is programmed to do,....

The block size debate has gotten to a point that some bitcoin observers think it could doom bitcoin. Bitcoin has defied all the bitcoin naysayers and prospered, recently setting record market capitalization. Will internal strife prove its ultimate undoing? A recent proposal designed to appease both sides in the bitcoin scalability debate may be doomed because of the way in which it became public. Laura Shin, a Forbes columnist, reported on the Extension Blocks proposal and its role the increasingly contentious conflict over changing the bitcoin block size. Proposal Didn’t Follow Protocol.....

Bitcoin developers have been debating whether or not to increase the allowable block size to 20MB, as the network is struggling with verifying transactions now that volumes are growing. At the moment, there is a limit of 1MB per block, which limits the number of transactions that the network can handle per second. According to lead bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, the best solution might be to develop a code that would allow for a larger block size. His proposal features a bitcoin hard fork that would allow any block with a timestamp on or after March 1, 2016 to be up to 20 megabytes.....

The block size debate, long one of the defining challenges hanging over bitcoin's tech community, took an interesting twist late last month. A years-long discussion about how best to scale the functioning $15bn economic network mid-flight, the debate has largely been characterized by a face-off between those who would increase the 1MB block size via an efficiency improvement called SegWit, and those who want to change the hard-coded block size limit to 2MB or more. You'll notice that, so far, neither side has called for a block size decrease. But that was exactly the view represented in a....