Gavin Andresen Proposes Bitcoin Hard Fork to Address Network Scalability

Bitcoin Foundation chief scientist Gavin Andresen has proposed increasing the number of transactions allowed on the bitcoin network by raising the maximum block size by 50% per year.
Doing so would require a hard fork and ‘some risk’, Andresen conceded in a new Bitcoin Foundation blog post, but he concluded that such proposals are necessary for the long-term viability of bitcoin as a global payments system.
Entitled A Scalability Roadmap, the piece builds on Andresen’s past statements regarding how he believes the bitcoin network can be scaled to handle more transactions. While the near-term need to do so may not seem apparent, Andresen wrote, an opportunity to address the bitcoin network’s scalability needs shouldn’t be missed.
Andresen suggested that the bitcoin development community’s consensus-driven decision-making process might result in an alternative solution or even multiple fixes to scalabiilty. Still, he argued that the limit on bitcoin transactions has been identified in the past as a weakness in need of addressing.
Andresen wrote:

This post was published at Coin Desk on October 8, 2014.