Bitcoin’s chief scientist, Gavin Andresen (aka Gavin Bell), stated in a blog post yesterday that Bitcoin needs to increase the number of transactions allowed on the network by raising the maximum block size over time. This will require a hard fork, which is a mandatory and somewhat risky update to the client software.
During the early years of Bitcoin, before Satoshi Nakamoto vanished and left Gavin holding the bag, Bitcoin’s infamous founder rolled-out several half-baked solutions to denial-of-service attacks. One of those “fixes” was to reduce the maximum block size from infinite to 1MB. The plan was always to later raise that limit as time allowed and as transaction volume increased.
There is already a general consensus in the community that something needs to change in order to increase the transactions per second limit. Agreeing on exactly how to accomplish this goal is where a consensus has not been reached. There are loads of potential solutions and scenarios.
Here is Gavin’s favorite plan of attack:"Roll out a hard fork that increases the maximum block size, and implements a rule to increase that size over time, very similar to the rule that decreases the block reward over time."
The bitcoin network is currently processing around 60K transactions per day. So for now, the data requirements of the bitcoin network aren’t huge which means the 1MB block size is currently sufficient.
However, the 1MB block size may lead to issues down the road as Bitcoin reaches mass adoption. Gavin said in his blog post yesterday that he believes the 21 million maximum bitcoin limit should remain unchanged. But who knows what might happen in the future?
Gavin Andresen is the Amherst, Massachusetts based chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation. He has access to the alert key that allows him to broadcast messages of his choosing to all clients. Some critics have argued that power makes him the central ruling figure of Bitcoin and a potential single point of failure.
Full Story: http://altcoinpress.com/2014/10/bitcoin-chief-scientist-its-time-to-put-a-fork-in-bitcoin/
