Bitcoin company CoinWallet is set to conduct a stress test on the bitcoin network in September and warned that this could create a 30-day backlog. For now, the company hasn’t set a specific date for the stress test but also noted that the results could support calls for a hard fork in the network.
CoinWallet’s previous stress test achieved only 15% of the output due to a crash in its servers. The company plans to flood the system with countless small transactions, enough to fill two blocks every minute then send out slightly larger transactions.
Bitcoin Stress Test
“We feel that our tests might prove to be the catalyst that propels the core devs and miners to implement the required hard fork that is desperately needed,” CoinWallet mentioned.
According to a CoinWallet representative, the process to set up the bitcoin stress test could prove to be very complicated. The test will require reconsolidating 150 bitcoin in existence on the wallets. CoinWallet said the second phase of the test will be to use 20 cloud-hosted servers to send bitcoin payments in amounts of 0.00001 to thousands of its addresses at random, all in transactions that are also approximately 3KB each.
For now, the bitcoin network is faced with two different versions of the software. There’s the Bitcoin Core and the newly-launched Bitcoin XT, which was developed by Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn to allow developers and miners to opt out of the version that limits the block size to 1MB. The bitcoin block size debate has been going on for quite some time and the lack of a governing body in the industry has made it difficult to come up with a solution.
With that, the decision is left to the entire bitcoin network, making miners choose between Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Core then shifting to the version that is run by majority of the computers in the system.