Gavin Andresen Optimistic About Scaling Bitcoin

NEW YORK (InsideBitcoins) – Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen gave the opening talk on day two of the 2015 MIT Bitcoin Expo, and his remarks mainly focused on the issue of scaling bitcoin to potentially billions of new users in the future. Andresen covered some of the improvements that have already been implemented for the purposes of scaling the bitcoin blockchain, and he also seemed rather optimistic in regards to the bitcoin developer community’s ability to help bitcoin scale as a widely-used store of value, payment system, and global ledger for storing facts that cannot be repudiated.
We’ve already made some progress
During his presentation, Andresen pointed out that some progress towards a scalable blockchain has already been made by a variety of bitcoin developers. The first example he pointed to is the 0.10 release of Bitcoin Core. It now takes ‘hours instead of days’ to download the bitcoin blockchain thanks to this most recent version of the core protocol. Andresen also noted that pruning should be ready ‘soon’, which would allow users to only store the data they need to validate new transactions rather than the entire blockchain.
Recent work completed by Blockstream’s Greg Maxwell and Matt Corallo should allow block announcements to be ‘up to a hundred times smaller’ was also mentioned by Andresen. This has not been pushed into the core protocol yet, but Andresen noted that it ‘will speed up the network part of block propagation by a couple orders of magnitude.’ This is the sort of ‘low-hanging fruit’ that Andresen believes can eventually help scale the bitcoin blockchain to where it needs to be in the future.

This post was published at Inside Bitcoins on Mar 10, 2015.