On February 21, representatives of the Bitcoin mining industry and a group of Bitcoin Core developers met in Hong Kong to discuss a solution to the Bitcoin block size scaling problem. After meeting for more than 18 hours, they released a statement with agreement on several points about the debate.
The statement was agreed upon by the founding team of AntPool, A-XBT, BitFury, Bitmain, BTCC Pool, F2 Pool, Genesis Mining and GHash.io. These mining executives represent more than 80 percent of total blocks mined in recent months, according to Blockchain.info . Several Bitcoin Core developers also signed their agreement, namely Cory Fields, Johnson Lau, Luke Dashjr, Matt Corallo and Peter Todd.
They announced that segregated Witness (SegWit), a proposed change in Bitcoin’s code that changes the way that data from Bitcoin transaction signatures are stored, will continue to be developed and released in the next two months. SegWit has received a positive reaction from members of the Bitcoin community after being presented by Pieter Wuille, one of the founders of Blockstream, at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong.
In addition, the statement said that “[Core developers] will continue to work with the entire Bitcoin protocol development community to develop, in public, a safe hard-fork based on the improvements in SegWit … as a recommendation to Bitcoin Core within three months after the release of SegWit.”
The statement continues:
“This hard-fork is expected to include features which are currently being discussed within technical communities, including an increase in the non-witness data to be around 2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB, and will only be adopted with broad support across the entire Bitcoin community.”
When the Bitcoin Core team has approved the changes and there is strong support from the community, it will support the implementation of a hard fork. This […]
