While bitcoin has been hitting new all-time highs on a regular basis this year, there are still issues that remain when it comes to how upgrades should be added to the network. For the past couple of years, the main area of focus on this perceived inability for bitcoin to upgrade has been the network’s block size limit.
The block size limit has now been replaced with a block weight limit via the Segregated Witness (SegWit) upgrade.
As a quick refresher, the block size limit was the amount of data (transactions) that could be contained in a new block, which would then be added to the blockchain. The block size limit was 1 MB, but it has now been replaced by a 4 MB block weight limit.
Previously, it was thought that an increase to the block size limit would require a hard fork, but Bitcoin Corecontributor Luke Dashjr found a way to implement such an increase via a soft fork by way of SegWit. A soft fork is a backwards-compatible change to the network, while a hard fork effectively requires every user to switch over to a new cryptocurrency network. For this reason, the contributors to Bitcoin Core tend to prefer soft forks whenever possible.
Before SegWit, there had been multiple attempts to gain support for hard-forking increases to the block size limit. In fact, these sorts of proposals are still made today. SegWit2xis a proposal to add an additional, hard-forking increase to the effective block size limit on top of the increase that was already provided by SegWit.
Of course, the issue with these sorts of hard-forking proposals is that, as mentioned before, they require everyone to move over to a new network. If everyone does not move over, it becomes unclear if a hard fork has happened or a new altcoin has been created. The inability to gauge support for a hard fork proposal has been one of the key reasons these sorts of changes haven’t been used on the network during the past two years' scaling drama.
Many bitcoin proponents, such as Civic CEO Vinny Lingham, believe a contentious hard fork would lead to huge issues for the world's biggest cryptocurrency, mainly as it relates to branding.
Having said that, Bloq economist Paul Sztorc publicly shared a solution to this issue all the way back in 2015 when the main proposal for a hard-forking increase to the block size limit was found in the Bitcoin XT software client from developers Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen.
Bron: Forbes
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