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The price of Bitcoin surged late last week as it became clear that a proposal to expand the Bitcoin network's capacity had the support it needed to go into effect. Supporters of the proposal hope that it will put an end to a two-year-old feud that has been tearing the Bitcoin community apart.
The core dispute is over how to accommodate the payment network's growing popularity. A hard-coded limit in Bitcoin software—1 megabyte per blockchain block—prevents the network from processing more than about seven transactions per second. The network started to bump up against this limit last year, resulting in slow transactions and soaring transaction fees.
Some prominent figures in the Bitcoin community saw an easy fix: just increase that 1MB limit. But Bitcoin traditionalists argued that the limit was actually a feature, not a bug. Keeping blocks small ensures that anyone can afford the computing power required to participate in Bitcoin's consensus-based process for authenticating Bitcoin transactions, preventing a few big companies from gaining de facto control over the network.
This seemingly esoteric debate has nearly torn the Bitcoin community apart over the last two years. While Bitcoin insiders squabbled, competitors like Ethereum have soared in value and gained developer mindshare.
The new agreement aims to bridge the divide between the warring factions, bringing Bitcoin users faster processing times and lower transaction fees. The larger question is whether this deal will become the foundation for a new, more collaborative approach to expanding the Bitcoin network—or whether it will merely represent a temporary ceasefire in the Bitcoin community's increasingly bitter civil war.
Source: A new deal could end Bitcoin’s long-running civil war
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 26 2017, @10:42PM (5 children)
Why is it that a blockchain blocksize of 1 MB limits the number of transactions per second?
And won't larger size make ASIC/FPGA designs harder as more on chip SRAM will be needed?
Is Ethereum technically as good as Bitcoin? and it provides anonymity unlike Bitcoin?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday July 26 2017, @11:13PM
Nice, non-technical summary: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ameer-rosic-/ethereum-vs-bitcoin-whats_b_13735404.html [huffingtonpost.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Wednesday July 26 2017, @11:15PM (3 children)
The Bitcoin ledger is recorded in blocks that come out once every ten minutes. The block chain solves the Byzantine Generals problem and prevents double spending of currency. In the whitepaper it is described starting as a timestamping chain.
Each transaction is a certain amount of data, and of course the 1 MB limit means there are a finite amount of transactions per ten minute block.
I'm not qualified to say whether Ethereum is technically as good as Bitcoin. It doesn't provide anonymity. ZCash does, but may be subject to inflation later on if somehow the original key selection process was compromised (the odds of that may be very low). There are other anonymity-providing cryptocurrencies such as ZeroCoin and Dash, but they don't seem to have achieved the same success as ZCash. It's thought that anonymity features may one day be included in Bitcoin in a manner similar to ZCash or ZeroCoin - it's already possible to use Bitcoin as a base on which to build other virtual currencies.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 27 2017, @07:00AM (2 children)
Why not increase the rate at which new blocks are released?
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday July 27 2017, @12:21PM
That would modify the rate at which currency units are issued, which is one of the fundamental design decisions of Bitcoin. That would be far more controversial than any other proposal on the table. :)
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 27 2017, @12:41PM
The fundamental caractheristics of the Bitcoin protocol have been agreed upon a long time ago, at inception, and are difficult to adjust, since everyone participating in the network has agreed to those terms.
Changing the block size is like adjusting an internal working of the thing, with little impact on the end users (except, obviously, better QoS which is nice). Changing the block lenght would have a huge impact on just about everything the has been built on bitcoin.
I still think the impact would be mostly positive, but it'd still be too huge to handle.
Sidenote: Decresing blocktime tenfold would just change the limit by an order of magnitue, but not solve it in the long run.