A controversial bitcoin alternative may be making a comeback. With such a large community, bitcoin has perhaps inevitably seen disagreement about its future development. Having launched earlier this year, Bitcoin Unlimited grew out of an active movement to quickly pick up bitcoin’s userbase by increasing the block size, or a hardcoded limit on the number of transactions that the network can process per block. This is a contentious change that many Bitcoin Core developers don’t support. But while its developers were quiet for a while, the alternative bitcoin implementation has seen a resurgence since receiving a nearly half a million dollar donation from an anonymous source. The latest news is that Bitcoin investor Roger Ver’s mining pool mined its first Bitcoin Unlimited block on Wednesday. And Saturday, the Unlimited community hosted a conference in San Francisco, called “ Satoshi’s Vision: Bitcoin Development & Scaling Conference .” It mirrors the technical tone of Bitcoin Core’s Scaling Bitcoin conference, but while developers of the main implementation seem to favor scaling by adding a new layer to the bitcoin blockchain sometime in the future, Bitcoin Unlimited’s talk titles (eg; “We’re Ready For Bigger Blocks”) highlight the continued push for on-chain scaling solutions . In addition to exploring new technical proposals, chief scientist at Bitcoin Unlimited, Dr Peter Rizun, sees the conference as a way for the community to meet face-to-face to figure out how best to proceed on technical changes and continue to establish themselves as a major competitor to Bitcoin Core. Rizun told CoinDesk: "Bitcoin Unlimited is a real thing. We’re a serious team and we have the funds to make things happen." Bitcoin Unlimited, launched in January, is another block size-boosting bitcoin version (although it’s been an idea for longer than that), following the likes of Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin […]
