BitPay, the largest bitcoin payment processor has sided with Gavin Andresen’s court by showing its support towards incorporation of BIP 101. In other words, BitPay in one of their blog posts mentioned that the company supports the move to increase bitcoin block size from 1 MB to 8 MB (which is known as BIP 101).
Bitcoin XT has been a topic of serious debate among the bitcoin community for a while now. The debate has ranged ever since Gavin Andresen, the Chief Scientist at Bitcoin Foundation and Mike Hearn proposed Bitcoin XT a few months ago.
The Bitcoin XT proposal was later changed to incorporate a few changes after receiving inputs from members of the bitcoin community. While there are few who are in favor of a 7MB increase in the bitcoin block size, there are others who are opposed to this idea. The bitcoin block size limit is currently 1 MB, which Bitcoin XT proposed to change to 8 MB. Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn finally launched a Bitcoin XT fork few days ago. The launch didn’t go will with many bitcoin based entities who are also part of the club.
The bitcoin network has experienced rapid growth since its inception in 2009. At the current rate of growth, the bitcoin network with 1 MB block size limit will be left obsolete by 2017.
BitPay has put forward a sensible argument as to why BIP 101 has to be incorporated while expressing its support towards its integration into bitcoin core client. Contrary to the opinions of a few people, BitPay believes that the integration of BIP 101 will not compromise the integrity of the Bitcoin network. BIP 101 will instead protect the decentralized nature of the bitcoin network. BitPay sees the current argument against integration of BIP 101 to be favoring a centralized group of developers, which if continued will compromise the decentralized nature of the bitcoin network. Increased block size limit will prevent big mining companies from running a full bitcoin node, thereby preserving the decentralized nature of bitcoin.
To summarize in the words of Stephen Pair, the CEO and co-founder of BitPay — BIP 101 will safeguard bitcoin’s decentralized nature while providing reliable, immediate path towards greater network throughput and BitPay supports merging BIP 101 into Bitcoin Core.
