How Bitcoin Unlimited Users May End Up on Different Blockchains

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. But as explained in “How....

Dropbox has announced the discontinuation of its unlimited storage plan due to the increasing misuse of the service by users engaged in resource-intensive activities such as cryptocurrency mining.  With the surge in popularity of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, the demand for computational resources has led to an unintended consequence for services offering unlimited storage.  […]

ViaBTC, one of the largest mining pools in the world, experienced a 50% drop in its hashpower after allocating all of its resources in mining Bitcoin Unlimited blocks. Bitcoin Unlimited is an alternative project with which miners can decide the size of the blocks they wish to mine. ViaBTC for instance, is mining 2 MB blocks through Bitcoin Unlimited, while the Bitcoin.com mining pool is opting for a 16 MB blocksize. The team behind ViaBTC decided to move its entire mining pool to Bitcoin Unlimited due to their belief that the current capacity of the Bitcoin network significantly restricts....

Bitcoin exchanges are preparing for a potential hard fork execution of Bitcoin Unlimited. While most major Bitcoin exchanges including BTCC, Bitstamp and Bitfinex have clarified their stance on the hard fork contingency, some regional exchanges such as Korbit and HitBTC haven’t come to a consensus in regards to hard fork support. On March 24, Cointelegraph spoke to HitBTC about their questionable statement released to their users about the Bitcoin Unlimited hard fork. In their statement, HitBTC wrote: “Bitcoin Unlimited has been listed on the platform and is available for trading from....

ViaBTC has announced its support to Bitcoin Unlimited, mines its first Bitcoin Unlimited block. Bitcoin Unlimited, the fork of Bitcoin blockchain is receiving a lot of support lately. Soon after Bitcoin.com mining pool announced its support to Bitcoin Unlimited, another mining pool, ViaBTC has followed suit. ViaBTC, which claimed itself to be the fifth largest Bitcoin mining pool on Twitter recently has allocated its full hashing power to mine Bitcoin Unlimited blocks. The mining pool, launched on June 5, 2016, has rapidly climbed through the ranks to be among the top mining pools on the....