On February 21, 2016, representatives of the Bitcoin industry and Bitcoin Core developers have finally come to a consensus to settle the never-ending block size debate.
The meeting was participated by Bitcoin Core developers and representatives of leading bitcoin mining firms and exchanges including Antpool, BitFury, Bitmain, Bit-X, Blockcloud, BTCC, BW, Coinfloor F2Pool, Genesis Mining, HaoBTC, Huobi, Ledger, OKCoin and Spoodoolies-Tech.
All representatives of the abovementioned companies have agreed on the following points:
- Segregated Witness, a soft-fork proposal to optimize the block size by relocating some data sets outside of the original merkle tree will proceed towards release in the upcoming months.
- Bitcoin Core team and industry leaders will continue to make pubic improvements to Segregated Witness. Bitcoin Core team will create a hard fork based on Segregated Witness
- Bitcoin Core-compatible consensus systems will be implemented.
- Both Core developers and representatives are dedicated in utililzing scaling technologies which optimize block space.
Considering the abovementioned points, the Core developers and industry leaders have come to a consensus to code for the hard fork based on Segregated Witness in July 2016, and activate the hard-fork activation around July 2017.
Despite the growing support for Bitcoin Classic, a block size increase proposal led and supported by leading companies including Coinbase and CEO, the Bitcoin Core team and the majority of mining firms worldwide are determined to implement Segregated Witness, which will be released in April 2016, and create a hard-fork based on the test results of running Segregated Witness.
Rather than immediately increasing the bitcoin block size by 2 megabytes with out any prior knowledge of the effect that could potentially negatively impact the Bitcoin network, the proposal and plan of the Bitcoin Core team and leading mining firms sound more reasonable and logical at this point, considering that there is urgency in doubling the block size.
However, if the Bitcoin Classic becomes activated by reaching its 75% threshold, there is a possibility that the Core chain and Classic chain will co-exist. In such an event, the Core team will continue the development of the Core chain and implementation of Segregated Witness, to present a more viable and safer version of a block size increase hard fork proposal.