Bitcoin was first introduced in the year 2009. Since then the digital currency’s network has been growing non-stop. Over the past few years, bitcoin network has grown over multiple times but not much changes have happened on the technical side since its inception.
The bitcoin block size has remained at 1 MB since the beginning and in order to ensure the survival of bitcoin, it is very important to increase the block size. The bitcoin community has realized the severity of the situation and there have been multiple attempts to increase the block sizes since then. However, being a distributed decentralized network any changes to the blockchain can be made only after a consensus is reached by a majority of the community.
Some of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals for increasing block size includes BIP-100 , BIP-101 , BIP-102 , Bitcoin Classic and more. However, all these proposals have been shot down by one segment of the bitcoin community or another. These proposals were rejected mainly due to self-serving reasons or apprehension about the validity and impact of the proposed changes. The bitcoin mining community has been very vocal about block size increase since the beginning, at a cost of the whole bitcoin ecosystem.
Bitcoin miners are responsible for supplying the required processing power to keep the bitcoin network operational. The processing power contributed by miners is used to discover new blocks on the blockchain and process all bitcoin transactions happening over the network. For their contribution, they receive fresh bitcoins as a reward. As bitcoin network grows, the processing power required for mining bitcoin also increases. The increased processing power requirement is in direct correlation with the increasing complexity of mathematical problems that has to be solved to discover new blocks. Mining bitcoin is not possible with normal PCs or graphic processing […]
