Why did Bitcoin fork and split? The inability of the community to find consensus regarding a proposal to increase the block size resulted in a user-activated hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain in August 2017. While numerous proposals advocating a change to the block size limit had failed to gather the support required to manifest change, transaction fees had skyrocketed by mid-2017. During August 2015, the average BTC transaction fee was just $0.50. However, by June 2017, median fees had increased 10x to approximate $5. With nearly half of the world’s population living on less than $5.50 per day, high …

If you had the pleasure to watch ‘The Revenant’, you might have noticed how nature helps, as well as torments, the protagonist during his struggle to survive. And it is this protagonist who, despite facing the harshest evils, triumphs over his insufferable pains. He emerges as a hero — tormented yet alive. It might sound like an exaggerated comparison but Bitcoin has seen this same struggle. It had a wonderful year in 2015, with lots of investments and adoptions coming its way. In terms of trading, Bitcoin was named the most profitable investment of 2015 by many mainstream media outlets. …

A very controversial problem today in cryptocurrency is the idea of “blocksize”, which has become unaddressed in the field over the past year. With concern growing over blockchain inflation and how well this technology will be able to scale, cryptocurrency Emercoin has taken a proactive approach and has granted Cointelegraph exclusive access to their solution. Every cryptocurrency can only spend the entire Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) when making a transaction. When a wallet contains many past transactions and needs to make a new outgoing transaction (payment), the wallet will select the best subset of suitable UTXO's to generate the payment. …

DASH has released a decentralized voting and fund allocation mechanism that could bypass the internal tensions of Bitcoin and its dramatic block size debate. Who will decide? A great deal of attention has been going to Bitcoin's blocksize debate, which includes fundamental aspects of how Core Development is funded, distributed, and by whom. While Bitcoin is going through the computer science equivalent of group therapy, DASH, the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has released a Decentralized Governance by Blockchain System while taking notes from Bitcoin's internal turmoil, in an attempt to completely bypass it. A few of the problems …

The battle rages on within the Bitcoin community on how to move forward with potential hard fork changes designed to accommodate larger block sizes. Jeff Garzik’s BIP 100 proposal has taken the mining industry by storm, gathering a majority of support of those currently voting. Meanwhile, Bitcoin corporate leaders have formed a united front around the proposal by Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen called BIP 101. Which side are you on? On Tuesday, August 24, the leaders of many of the largest Bitcoin companies in the world signed off on BIP 101 as their revision of choice. They crafted a …

Three of the biggest Western mining pools – representing a total of some 19% of hashing power on the Bitcoin network – stand divided on raising the block size limit. An inquiry by Cointelegraph has shown that both KnCMiner and Slush Pool are in favor of Gavin Andresen's proposal(s) to raise this limit. But the biggest of the three, BitFury, is more conservative. As such, a network-wide switch to Bitcoin XT to allow for bigger blocks seems even more unlikely, for now. Block Size Limit Lacking consensus among Core developers on how and when to raise the block size limit, …

Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen today proposed a hard fork change for Bitcoin XT in order to allow for an increased block size limit on the Bitcoin network. So far, however, it has failed to appease most critics of his previous proposals to increase the block size limit. Hard Fork It is widely agreed that at some point an increase of the block size limit will be needed to allow the Bitcoin network to handle more than seven transactions per second. The Bitcoin Core development team, however, has so far not been able to reach consensus on the correct timing …

The world’s two largest economies; two of the three most populated countries on earth; much more importantly: the world’s two largest Bitcoin mining communities locking horns in a struggle for power and control over the Bitcoin blockchain. The Far East versus the West; the United States versus China: a classic battle of global superpowers that may not have a winner, but may take the world’s first global currency down in the digital crossfire. Possible implosion The issue of Bitcoin block size is coming to a head within a matter of days. Could a battle over block size between Western businesses …

Of all Bitcoin web-wallet providers as listed on bitcoin.org, Blockchain.info, Coinbase and Xapo are in favor of raising Bitcoin's block size limit from 1 to 20 megabytes as advised by Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen, while Coinkite and GreenAddress have come out against the proposal. This means that Bitcoin's major wallet providers based on venture capital investments as well as the total amount of users – Blockchain.info, Coinbase and Xapo - all agree on Andresen's proposal to raise the maximum size of Bitcoin blocks to 20 megabytes. But with Coinkite and GreenAddress opposing the idea, an industry consensus remains out …

Two of China's biggest bitcoin exchanges - BTCChina and Huobi - have criticized Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen's proposal to raise the block size limit to 20 megabytes by next year. Speaking to Cointelegraph, both BTCChina as well as Huobi indicated that they believe any increase in Bitcoin's block size limit should be approached conservatively. While both exchanges recognize that the current one megabyte block size limit is probably too small for Bitcoin to reach mainstream adoption, they are skeptical of Andresen's proposal. BTCChina and Huobi shared concerns that a jump to 20 megabytes might be too big, while suggesting …

It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Throw a dynamic and interconnected social-technical distributed currency network into the mix, and even the famously epigrammatic Yogi Berra would be at a loss to package the issue in an appropriately pithy witticism. The core developers of the Bitcoin protocol face a difficult technical decision. How they decide to respond to an impending 1MB limit on the maximum block size allowed in the blockchain will fundamentally impact how and even whether the technology can be used for everyday purchases or institutional transfers, by average people or professional investors alike. There are …

Recent innovative ideas and projects, such as micropayment channels and the lightning network, are creating trustless channels between people so they can transact with each other without touching the blockchain. This could not only save time and memory resources, but it could also help solve the block size problem. The blockchain requires massive memory, which will increase exponentially in the future and cause scalability issues. Developers have had many discussions and debates about increasing the block size from 1 MB to 20 MB. On the one hand, in order for bitcoin to go global, it needs a much bigger block …