It has now been more than two years since the bitcoin community has been consumed by a discussion over increased capacity with miners and the wider network remaining divided, 31% choosing segwit, while 41% want Bitcoin Unlimited. As good as all prominent bitcoin businesses and miners recently reached an agreement to activate segwit followed by a 2MB hardfork six months down the line, an agreement...
Imagine you are slightly late for work, quickly getting a shower, brushing your teeth and all the rest, walking – in an almost running manner – to the tube station, to then find out there are 200,000 people waiting outside to get the train. What’s more, the train only handles 4,000 individuals and arrives every ten minutes, during which period new individuals arrive at a rate of 4 per second...
Ethereum's transaction volumes have now reached around 161,000 a day, up this month from around 100,000, in a sign of growing use and increasing utility of the barely two years old network. Transaction volumes on bitcoin, on the other hand, have sort of leveled. Yesterday it handled around 319,000, but it varies up and down due to its backlogs which might be forcing users to not transact. That...
The bitcoin network broke down last night for 200,000 transactions which continue to wait this morning for inclusion within the blockchain so that value can be transferred through the bitcoin network. Bitcoin’s transaction space measured in bytes is limited for every ten minutes and can handle less than a floppy disk could 30 years ago. Demand, however, has clearly increased considerably as shown...
The number of stuck bitcoin transactions has spiked to an all-time high of 160,000, according to blockchain.info, doubling the mempool size from around 60MB to 120MB, the highest it has ever been before. It’s not clear what caused the spike, but it comes at a time of increased bitcoin volatility. The currency has seen a price appreciation of some $600 in just two weeks, rising from around $1,200...
Bitcoin is currently operating at over capacity following a significant price increase by around $600 in just one week. 100,000 transactions are now stuck, unable to move, weighing around 68MB. That means 68 blocks would be needed to clear the backlog, taking around 11 hours, but that’s only if there are no further transactions being made in the meantime. As new transactions do come in, older...
In a complete u-turn, F2Pool has now announced they are in favor of segregated witnesses (segwit), a protocol upgrade that gradually increases capacity to around 1.7MB for every 10 minutes, as well as fixes some aspects of transaction malleability, allowing for the Lighning Network and sidechains. According to a translation by cnLedger, F2Pool publicly stated today on their website: “Users are...
In a surprising move, F2Pool, which has around 9% network hardware share, began signaling for segregated witnesses (segwit), a controversial proposal that aims to increase capacity while facilitating layer two protocols such as the Lightning Network and sidechains. Unlike in litecoin, where the market rallied after F2Pool began signaling segwit, there was no price reaction in bitcoin, which may...
Litecoin’s price rose some 20% today following news that BW was signaling for segregated witnesses (segwit), a protocol upgrade which combines added on-chain capacity with fixes that aim to support the Lightning Network and other layer-two protocols. Price reacted almost instantly to the news, rising from around $9.70 to just under $12, currently seemingly settled around $11.30 at the time of...
The never ending bitcoin debate has now seemingly moved on to new never ending proposals that try to provide a solution to bitcoin’s very congested network, but in a repetitive fashion, like a broken tape, seemingly never going anywhere. The latest such proposal is a flag-day soft-fork marketed under the name of user activated soft-fork or UASF. Marek Palatinus, founder of Slush pool, publicly...
A new study by the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies reveals that “43% of the transactions are still not included in the Blockchain after 1h from the first time they were seen in the network and 20% of the transactions are still not included in the Blockchain after 30 days, revealing therefore great inefficiency in the Bitcoin system.” The bitcoin network was studied over a period of three...
The latest developments in the Cryptowar are what appears to be a developing schism between some Lightning Network developers and contributors to Bitcoin Core after Joseph Poon, a Lightning Network developer, Stephen Pair from BitPay, Christopher Jeffrey from Purse and Fedor Indutny, published an extension blocks proposal that both increases on-chain capacity and fixes malleability. Discussions...
I woke up today to what appeared to be good news. Joseph Poon, a Lightning Network developer, Stephen Pair from BitPay, Christopher Jeffrey from Purse and Fedor Indutny, had published a seemingly interesting proposal. In what appeared to be a compromise that may reluctantly get the support of both sides, they proposed both on-chain scaling and segwit activation through a mechanism called...
While it briefly appeared that Bitcoin Unlimited might actually activate, the chances now seem slim as a relatively new bitcoin pool, which has suddenly shot to around 8% network share, appears to be very much against Bitcoin Unlimited. 1Hash publicly posted on China’s version of twitter where they stated, according to a very rough translation, that “BU has violated the BTC consensus agreement.”...
Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s CEO, publicly said he does not support the statement of around 20 bitcoin exchanges which says that in the event of a hard fork they will list the Bitcoin Core chain as BTC regardless of the longest chain or, presumably, regardless of price and other factors. Armstrong said: “It doesn't make sense to say BTC can only be modified by one development team. If there is...
Blockchain.info, one of the biggest and oldest bitcoin wallet provider, publicly stated that bitcoin experienced its busiest week ever from the 20th to the 27th of November. Antoine Le Calvez, a software engineer at the company, stated: “Between Nov 20th and 27th, Bitcoin faced its busiest week ever with 2 million transactions, a near-constant backlog of tens of thousands of transactions to...