There is no shortage of ideas about how to meet the bitcoin scaling challenge. More importantly, however, is the willingness of the community to share its ideas and work on ways to bring them to fruition. This much was obvious from this weekend’s Scaling Bitcoin “Retarget” conference held at the Politecnico di Milano Piazza Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, Italy. This year’s two-day conference, designed to present solutions to the scalability challenge, featured a host of speakers and drew an enthusiastic attendance. The conference provided a venue where developers, miners and researchers can conference about bitcoin development. Presentations Recorded The presentations were videotaped and are posted on the conference website , along with presentation transcripts. The postings mark an improved level of cooperation in the bitcoin community since last year’s Montreal conference. Topics this year included improving bitcoin throughput; security and privacy; layer 2 ideas (such as payment channels); fee structures and incentives; network resilience; testing modeling and simulation; anti-spam measures; mining concerns; block size proposals; and community coordination. The workshops were intended to facilitate the existing bitcoin improvement proposals process. Most work will occur after the workshops, which are additive to the design and review process by enhancing awareness of proposals, simulations, studies and diverse viewpoints. Workshops addressed fungibility, community, Lightning Network scalability, scalability of other second layer systems, implementation, and breaking the chain. Fungibility Critical Adam Black, Blockstream CEO, and Matt Corallo, Blockstream co-founder, began with an overview on bitcoin’s fungibility. They noted bitcoin fungibility has gotten bad with some wallets, and that fungibility is important for it to serve as a payment mechanism. A fungibility collapse could lead to a loss of confidence and a price crash. Adlai Chandrasekhar then explained the basics of JoinMarket, a protocol, and privacy attacks on the JoinMarket ecosystem in 2016. […]
