ForexMinute.com – Despite the occasional crashes, Bitcoin ecosystem is still booming with increasing merchant adoption and funding rounds. The tomorrow-land of finance market is gradually opening towards new possibilities in digital currency arena.
Bitcoin Foundation chief scientist Gavin Andresen took this opportunity to convey his view on the future difficulties Bitcoin may face if it continues to operate on current block size. He further suggested to increase the maximum block size by 50% per year, which will definitely require the developers to fork the entire Bitcoin network.
Though the current block size limit (1 MB) seems sufficient for now, but Gavin fears it to be insufficient if, in case, transaction volume booms in future. By looking at this year’s adoption rate of Bitcoin, his concerns hold certain facts. But forking the network might not go well with the coin’s community, which will be required to transfer their overweighing data to the updated core client; errors are inevitable.
Amusingly, it was Gavin himself who once proposed to cut down the maximum block size from infinity to 1 MB. The decision however was taken to prevent then-occurring DDoS attacks. This time, the man is sure about the timing of such a fork, but is still unclear of the roadmap that will take Bitcoin there. He writes:
“There are other ideas for how to make Bitcoin scale, and whenever practical I like to choose “all of the above” for how to solve a problem, because nobody is smart enough to choose The One True Solution every time. So I won’t be surprised or disappointed if development wanders off this roadmap in a different direction.”
The chief scientist meanwhile is open for more ideas to achieve long-term stability for Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin network, which currently amounts over 60k transactions a day, would soon experience 400 million transactions per day. Though no definite time for this event is speculated, but indeed its occurrence is definite.
If the fork comes into effect, Bitcoin users may want the developers to focus on other issues as well. A lot have been commented earlier on the Bitcoin’s slow transaction confirmation (around 10 minutes), as well as awkward denominations, inconvertibility of 30 character addresses, inability to integrate complex scripts, and others.
To contact the reporter of the story: Yashu Gola at yashu@forexminute.com
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Bitcoin Foundation chief scientist Gavin Andresen took this opportunity to convey his view on the future difficulties Bitcoin may face if it continues to operate on current block size. He further suggested to increase the […]