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.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/02/07/double-your-money-looming-hard-fork-uncovers-fatal-bitcoin-flaw/#10e148d83cef
