Over the last several months, a controversy has been brewing in the world of Bitcoin. The entire Bitcoin infrastructure has a fast approaching hard-coded limit, and as yet the Bitcoin community hasn’t reached a consensus on a solution.
As the number of Bitcoin transactions increase, this one megabyte ceiling on the block size is now leading to increasingly long transaction backlogs, as the miners (transaction processors) struggle to deal with the impending limit.
The obvious solution is simply to increase the block size limit – but such a change is easier said than done, because it requires a hard fork of the Bitcoin protocol. (Less drastic soft fork options are also under consideration, but only serve to delay an eventual hard fork.)
With a hard fork, the revised protocol with the larger block size is essentially incompatible with the older, more limited protocol. As soon as enough miners have switched to the new protocol, then that one becomes the ‘official’ protocol, as those miners will no longer recognize Bitcoin transactions using the old protocol.
Now that many of Bitcoin’s core developers have rejected Bitcoin XT – one promising hard fork option I covered in a previous article – the most likely contender for fixing the blockchain limit is now Bitcoin Classic. Bitcoin Classic eschews the more strategic (and complicated) approach of Bitcoin XT, instead favoring a simplistic doubling of the block size limit – a simple but short-sighted solution to the problem.
From the perspective of the Bitcoin user, at some point their Bitcoin wallet software will simply stop working, and they’ll need to upgrade it to the latest version in order to resume Bitcoin transactions – a minor inconvenience, especially given how often and routinely we must all update the software we use.
Updating wallets, however, isn’t the issue. As a likely consensus on Bitcoin Classic approaches, some enterprising Bitcoiners have uncovered a potentially fatal flaw, not just with Bitcoin Classic, but with the hard fork process itself.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/02/07/double-your-money-looming-hard-fork-uncovers-fatal-bitcoin-flaw/.
Disagree with this article? Feel free to comment – but illegal attacks on Forbes or the author’s web sites will be reported to the authorities and dealt with to the full extent of the law. Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Peter Roberts.
