Hong Kong Summit To Discuss Bitcoin Block Size

The bitcoin network is running out of spare capacity and the debate over increasing the size of the blockchain has created several camps in the community. CoinDesk reports that the debate will once again take the centre stage in Hong Kong for two days of technical discussions to be held at Scaling Bitcoin, a development conference sponsored by MIT, Blockstream and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, among others.

The conference will be attended by prominent figures in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, including Blockstream president Adam Back, core developer Jeff Garzik and the lead developers behind the proposed Lightning Network, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja. Moreover, the largest mining pools, namely BW.com, F2pool, Antpool and BTCC Pool, will gather for discussing the controversial issue.

CoinDesk explains that currently bitcoin miners produce blocks up to the size limit of 1 MB per block, a process that takes place every 10 minutes on an average. With each new block, 25 BTC are added to the network. With recent rise in bitcoin price and transaction volumes hitting all-time highs, analysts fear that the blockchain will not be able to cope up and process the transactions fast enough.

Increasing the block size would result in more transactions per second, faster confirmation time, low transaction fees and more transactions for systems built on top of Bitcoin blockchain. On the other hand, raising the block size limit could lead to centralization of the network, unstable block generation, and decrease in the number of full nodes in the Bitcoin network as processing larger blocks will require more powerful hardware.

To raise the block size limit, 95% of the several of thousands of computers that contribute processing power to the network will be required to switch to a new software update, a process termed as a "hard fork".

"Today that whole blockchain is over 50GB," Bobby Lee, CEO of bitcoin mining and exchange firm BTCC, told CoinDesk. "If we dramatically increase the blockchain, most people’s computers won’t even be able to hold the blockchain. This could scale out of hand."

Several proposals have been put forth to overcome the problem including BIP 100, BIP 101, BitcoinXT fork, BIP 102, among others. So far, BIP 100 draws most of its support from the mining community. 

“I hope the Hong Kong meeting is very productive and the developers who attend reach consensus on how quickly to increase the maximum block size,” Gavin Andresen, bitcoin developer, told CoinDesk.

The second workshop pertaining to actual block size proposals will be held in Hong Kong on 6th and 7th December.