Bitcoin Classic , the Bitcoin implementation set to double Bitcoin’s 1 megabyte block size limit by a hard fork, suffered a significant setback shortly after its official release this week. A group of prominent exchanges, mining pools and other industry players organized under the “Bitcoin Roundtable” collective, stated publicly they will not switch to Bitcoin Classic for the present.
Open Letter
An open letter by the Bitcoin Roundtable, including signatories representing major Bitcoin exchange Bitfinex , ASIC-manufacturer and mining pool BitFury , exchange, wallet service and mining pool BTCC , cloud hashing service Genesis Mining , mining pools F2Pool , BW Pool , Ghash.IO and others, states: “We think any contentious hard-fork contains additional risks and potentially may result in two incompatible blockchain versions, if improperly implemented. To avoid potential losses for all bitcoin users, we need to minimize the risks. It is our firm belief that a contentious hard-fork right now would be extremely detrimental to the bitcoin ecosystem.” Bitcoin Classic requires a 75 percent hash power activation threshold to activate a block size limit increase. Since the Bitcoin Roundtable collective accounts for more than 60 percent of hash power on the Bitcoin network today, activation seems unlikely unless some of the signatories reverse their positions.
Instead, the letter expresses support for an initial block size limit increase through Segregated Witness. This solution, which was made a first step in Bitcoin Core ‘s scalability “ roadmap ,” offers an effective block size limit increase of .6 megabyte to 1 megabyte, along with additional improvements. As one of its main benefits, Segregated Witness can be rolled out as a soft fork, meaning only miners need to upgrade, rather than all nodes on the Bitcoin network.
The letter reads: “We see the need for a modest block size increase in order to […]
