The Bitcoin community is getting impatient of Bitcoin Core. Thanks to delayed transactions and increasing Bitcoin miner fees. The digital currency has been suffering from mempool backlogs for some time now. Bitcoin transactions in many cases are taking as long as 24 hours to receive confirmations in the current scenario. These unresolved issues, which has been around for years now has got Bitcoin miners thinking about moving from Core to Unlimited.
The Bitcoin community has been debating about the block size and scalability issues for a while now. Many proposals (BIPs) like Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Unlimited (at one time) and others have been shot down due to lack of consensus among the community members. With no relief in sight, Bitcoin Unlimited has slowly emerged as miners’ favorite. Bitcoin Unlimited, proposed by the “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver has gained support from some of the popular Bitcoin miners. Recently, the world’s largest mining pool — AntPool announced its decision to support Bitcoin Unlimited.
Wu Jihan, the co-founder of BitMain — the largest Bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer and AntPool — largest mining pool was quoted in leading news outlets saying,
“We will switch our entire pool to Bitcoin Unlimited. We can’t tell how the hard fork will play out. We will only know by the time we get there.”
The decision of AntPool to join Bitcoin Unlimited takes the Bitcoin network one step closer to a hard fork. AntPool currently commands over 15% of the total hashing power, and its move will significantly impact the Bitcoin Core. Seeing the leading miner move to Bitcoin Unlimited, other mining pools (smaller or bigger) may also decide to follow suit. If it does happen, then Bitcoin Unlimited will gain the required 60%-70% support, activating a hard fork.
While some believe that increasing the block size is an answer to scaling the Bitcoin blockchain, Core developers disagree. They have introduced SegWit, a scalability solution, which is yet to gain enough traction among the community.
However, going by what happened with Ethereum, when it was hard-forked, even the Bitcoin Unlimited fork could result in two different versions of Bitcoin. Among the two which one will gain more followers is something, only time will decide. Meanwhile, if the scalability solution is not implemented soon, it is only a matter of time before Bitcoin loses out to some other altcoin.
Ref: Bloomberg | Image: NewsBTC
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