After five months of discussions, Gavin Andresen works to change bitcoin’s block size to 8MB. The new block size will be introduced in 2016. And from 2016 onwards, the size is expected to double every two years.
The long debate over the bitcoin block size is over. The updates being done to the bitcoin code have been published by the core developer Gavin Andresen on GitHub. The block size will change from 1MB to 8MB, with further doubling every two years – so in 2018, it will reach 16 MB, then 32MB in 2020 and so on.
The discussion started after a blog post published by Andresen in January:
Current block size, 1MB, allows only seven bitcoin transactions per second which becomes insufficient as the number of bitcoin transactions in the world grows. However, there are fears that the block size increase will make bitcoin miners more powerful, ultimately damaging the decentralized character of the cryptocurrency.
Chinese mining pools seem to have played the decisive role in the debate. As CoinFox wrote recently, a joint statement of BTCChina, Huobi, F2Pool, BW and Antpool favoured a compromise – an increase of the block size to 8MB instead of 20MB.
CoinFox will monitor further developments.
