With Mike Hearn taking a step back from Bitcoin development to work for private blockchain startup R3 , former Bitcoin Core lead developer Gavin Andresen indicated he might take over the lead of Bitcoin XT, the Bitcoin implementation programmed to increase the block-size limit through BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) 101 . Andresen, who shifted his efforts to Bitcoin XT earlier this year , told Bitcoin Magazine , reluctantly: “I might take over lead of XT, but I don’t want to.” It was announced last week that Hearn recently joined R3 as lead platform engineer, where the Google veteran and Bitcoin XT lead developer will work with some of the world’s largest banks on distributed ledger-based protocols for global financial markets. Hearn confirmed to Bitcoin Magazine that he will do the minimum required to keep Bitcoin XT running, but won’t actively develop or advocate the implementation any longer. Hearn, a staunch advocate of a block-size increase in order to allow for more transactions on Bitcoin’s network, implemented BIP 101 into Bitcoin XT this summer. With this patch, designed by Andresen, Bitcoin XT is set to increase the maximum block size to 8 megabytes if a threshold of 75 percent of mining power accepts the change. Once activated, this limit is set to double every two years. I will do releases to keep XT operational and may merge patches from time to time. It’s there for when people want it (or just the BIP 101 patches). The Bitcoin community needs to demonstrate a commitment to the blockchain it’s actually built on, today. I suspect things might start to happen after the December conference, as every big player I talked to expressed huge frustration that nothing was happening, but given their behaviour so far all it’d take is for Blockstream to announce […]
