Bitcoin Forum

The most recent hot topic in the coinage is the hard bifurcation caused by the expansion of bitcoin.


Currency expansion problem can be traced back to the currency in 2010, shortly after the birth of this in our block size limit of original design is 32 m, due to the currency early nodes and calculate the force less, often by DDoS attacks, in order to solve this problem, the hearing will block size limit temporarily reduce to 1 m, and points out that the future can restore limit to 32 m. But soon he disappeared, and because of the small volume of bitcoin transactions over a long period of time, the developers forgot about it.


By 2015, with the rapid growth of transaction volume of bitcoin, the size of 1M blocks has been stretched, and the problem of block enlargement has gradually been put on the agenda. Developers from around the world have come up with their own expansion plans, with more than a dozen of them, most of them hard forks.


The so-called "hard bifurcation" means that two incompatible bitcoins will be formed after the expansion, which will cause problems for users, and the bad design of hard bifurcation may even cause the loss of users' capital. The only soft fork program is called the isolation witness, but it greatly increases the complexity of the bitcoin code, making it difficult to prove a safe and reliable solution. As a result, none of these schemes have been supported by the vast majority of miners, and the problem of expansion has been slow to be resolved.


On August 1, until last year, called the currency cash (BCC) hard bifurcation solution is supported by a handful of miners, COINS formal bifurcate, produced two different COINS BTC and BCC. The BCC scheme extends the size limit of the bitcoin block to 8M without supporting the isolation witness. After BCC split, the price of BTC was not greatly reduced by many people, but continued to rise steadily, and the price of BCC was soon stable. The successful bifurcation of BCC proves that a hard fork is not as terrible as it is supposed to be.


On August 23, the separation saw that the soft bifurcation scheme was supported by the majority of the BTC miners, but three months later, it would be faced with a hard bifurcation extending to the 2M block. It is still unknown whether we can split the success or not, but with the successful experience of BCC hard fork, we believe that there will be no big problems.

That's the most recent hot topic? That was the rage of 2017, along with airdrops. I think this year could be the year of mining algorithm changes, as people try to discover alternatives to PoW as the majority choice. I had hoped it would be the year of decentralized exchanges, and who knows, maybe with atomic swaps in development, that could be a thing.

By the way, I'm pretty sure it's called forking, not bifurcation. Has something changed and I wasn't informed? Or are we trying to make the term hipper than good old fork?