Bitcoin Blocksize and The Future

Editors Note: The Bitcoin.com team agrees with Mr. Belshe thoughts. We support bigger blocks and Bitcoin Classic!

“We need to increase the throughput capacity of Bitcoin ASAP, or the rest of the world is going to move on without us.”

– Roger Ver CEO of Bitcoin.com

This post first appeared on www.belshe.com! It is written by Mr. Mike Belshe CEO of BitGo!

Also read: Bitcoin Classic Team Unveils 2016 Roadmap

Today, one of BitGo’s major customers complained to us that their transactions weren’t getting confirmed.  Why not?  Well, because the blocks are full.  They put the right fee on the transaction, BitGo’s platform dynamically computes the right fee every time.  But a sudden spike in demand left their transactions lingering for hours.  It’s not okay that our current, small Bitcoin exchanges are suffering due to Bitcoin Core flailing.

So I have a few things to say.

I’m sorry, engineers of Bitcoin, but you’re wrong with your fears that a larger block will break Bitcoin.  You’re doing what Donald Knuth told you not to do – premature optimization.  We have no hard data that indicates a 2MB block will be a significant issue with block propagation or centralization.  If you’re right, and larger blocks do require more optimization, we’ll optimize and fix once we’ve seen the real bottleneck.  From my own experience building HTTP/2.0, there is only one thing I know about optimizations:  you never know what to optimize until you’ve tried it!

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.   —