Dr Paul Ennis is a research assistant at The Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organization at University College Dublin, specializing in bitcoin and blockchain studies.
In this opinion piece, Dr Ennis discusses how bitcoin’s scaling debate has thus far evolved, examining the various competing efforts, their processes and what the differences say about the developer community and its culture. Bitcoin’s scaling debate is clearly one of its defining moments. It has pitted the user bases sharply against one another whether through endless Reddit debates, digital media or even at the "top" tier of the development teams. It also raised significant issues around centralization and bitcoin’s somewhat awkward relationship with the mostly China-based mining industry.
In this post, I will attempt to document different parts of the debate as it played out from different perspectives. I do not consider myself beholden to any specific strand and have attempted to be as neutral as is feasible. Corrections are always welcome.
The debate concerned a central technical issue that also had significant implications for how bitcoin is governed. For the Bitcoin Classic team, this meant, in essence, finding a solution that solved the filling of blocks due to high transaction volumes while also finding a way to move governance away from the Bitcoin Core development team and toward the mining community.
One of the first attempts to address this problem came from Mike Hearn, at the time a Bitcoin Core developer, in the form of BIP 64. BIP 64 was announced in June 2014 , but the client Bitcoin XT (the "precursor" to Classic) emerged in December 2014.
Bitcoin XT never took off, but it indicated Hearn’s early belief in the necessity of a new approach to the scaling problem. However, there was support for XT from one notable group of the bitcoin network: namely […]
