Developers pen open letter to Bitcoin community on network scalability

Bitcoin IMG_4400 (BTC Keychain_Flikr)

Wednesday, September 2, 2015 4:03 AM UTC

The debate over raising the capacity of the bitcoin network is going on for quite some time now. In line with the discussions, over 30 bitcoin core developers have signed an open letter to the bitcoin community about reaching a consensus in the matter, according to a recent report by CoinDesk.

When bitcoin was created in 2009, each block size (which records bitcoin transaction, created about every 10 minutes) had data limit of 1MB. Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn have proposed BitcoinXT, which would raise the block size limit to 8 MB, with this limit increasing over time.

Although the letter does not refer BitcoinXT, it begins by claiming bitcoin creator Satoshi sought "review and cooperation" and subsequent efforts by bitcoin developers has made the system faster and more secure.

"We're committed to bitcoin and responsive to the needs of the community. For the past five years, we've written code and managed over 50 bitcoin releases and reviewed more than 45 formal proposals to improve bitcoin's performance, security, and scalability. Technical discussions, while heated at times, are always focused on improving bitcoin", it said.

The letter pointed out that while substantial improvements have been already made in CPU bottlenecks, memory usage, network efficiency etc., a number of key challenges still remain.

"To mitigate potential existential risks, it behooves us all to take the time to evaluate proposals that have been put forward and agree on the best solutions via the consensus-building process."

It further spoke about two open workshops that will be conducted to explore these issues. The first workshop will held in Montreal on 12th-13th September and the second is planned for early December in Hong Kong.

The letter concluded by saying, "We believe this is the way forward and reinforces the existing review process that has served the bitcoin development community (and bitcoin in general) well to date."