A number of proposals have been made to deal with transaction processing over the years, often focusing
on increasing block size.
Today we discuss the week that was... the Bitcoin price surge, is it time to
increase the block size as transactions are being delayed.
It also suggests that a hard fork to
further increase the block size limit could be needed in the future, though it does not specify a specific point in time.
Bitcoin Cash is a famous example, which split from bitcoin in August 2017 to
increase the block size in a bid to speed up transactions.
This fixes a number of long - standing issues, such as transaction malleability UTXO growth, and also has a side benefit of
effectively increasing the block size limit from 1 MB to nearly 4 MB.
Bitcoin Cash: Bitcoin cash is a hard fork orchestrated by a portion of the community that wanted Bitcoin to scale better
through increasing its block size from the current 1 MB to 8 MB.
For instance, Bitcoin
Cash increased the block size from 1 MB to 8 MB making the processing of a larger number of transactions to be possible within the 10 - minute period.
Antpool, the biggest mining pool in the Bitcoin ecosystem with over 14 % of the global hashrate, has mined its first SegWit2x block today, signaling approval for the ambitious scaling agreement that seeks to implement the SegWit soft fork and a subsequent hard fork to
increase block size capacity to 2 MB.
Segregated Witness, the proposal put forth by Blockstream developer Dr. Pieter Wuille, has been trumpeted as a block size scaling solution that gets around the difficult scenarios associated with
increasing the block size utilizing a hard fork.
On the other end of the spectrum, Bitcoin's «Decentralists» fear that
increasing the block size too much could further centralize Bitcoin on a protocol level in several ways.
What exactly this growth will result in is unclear, but it may lead to Core
developers increasing the block size limit if Classic's growth continues this trend, as all other implementations have support for it already, with varying size limits.
However, the argument
over increased block size dragged on for over two years and ultimately the two teams decided to part ways in the form of a hard fork on the Bitcoin network.
Luckily there are two main proposed solutions: Bitcoin Unlimited, which aims to get rid of the block size limit altogether, and Segregated Witness (SegWit), which wants to slightly
increase the block size while also moving some non-essential data out of the transaction and off the blockchain.
Bitcoin Cash
already increased the block size to 8 MB during the August hardfork, and are planning to quadruple it to 32 MB and add other protocol changes on May 15th.
Another proposal to address Blockchain limitations is SegWit2x, which segregates the witness data and
also increases block sizes from 1 MB to 2 MB.
Although increasing the block size can solve the congestion problems on the Bitcoin network, it also leaves the way open for other problems to arise because it changes the fundamental economics of the network itself.
In response to Bitmain Co-Founder, Jihan Wu's statement that there was a need for size increases in order to reduce inevitable blockchain congestion; Adam Back, (HashCash Inventor and Blockstream CEO), explained that Bitcoin could
increase block sizes midterm, (but only after thorough testing).
At first, many had the same impression, since bitPico had been a vocal supporter of a controversial scaling initiative, and had continued to espouse the benefits of
increasing the block size parameter, even after most network participants ditched the effort.
The Core developers want to both maintain network security as well as decentralization, so naturally they are cautious to
increase the block size set by Satoshi.
«Although both are ultimately needed, sidechains are true innovation and value add in contrast to
merely increasing the block size and kicking a larger can,» said early Bitcoin investor Trace Mayer.