Amid Scaling Debate, Bitcoin Core Goes on Outreach Offensive

Even many of its members acknowledge Bitcoin Core has had a communication problem.
The largely volunteer development team, which provides peer review and testing for the bitcoin network’s underlying code, has been on the defensive following the decision by a former member to criticize the project for failing to take what he considered to be adequate measures to handle a greater volume of transactions.
From there, the problem has only escalated.
Feeling the pressure from a particularly negative news cycle, bitcoin businesses soon began looking to support proposals that offered what they believed were solutions that would prove faster than Bitcoin Core’s development roadmap. One alternative, named Bitcoin Classic, has served as a rallying point for those who want to institute a 2MB block size, up from 1MB today.
Less publicized has been the 7th December roadmap penned by Blockstream co-founder and Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell.
The roadmap, compiled with Maxwell’s estimation of consensus among the developers, advocated for the community to increase the capacity of the protocol not by increasing the limit on the size of the blockchain’s data blocks, but by making a change to how information on the network is counted toward this metric.
Called Segregated Witness, the proposal would, among other less publicized fixes, increase the blockchain’s capacity four-fold without requiring a hard fork that would change bitcoin’s consensus rules, a process that they believe may be too risky at present.
Still, many community members and businesses remain unclear about the recommendations and how the roadmap was produced.
Given that the issue has so often been termed the ‘block size debate’ by the press, there is confusion as to whether Segregated Witness solves the scaling problem at all, or whether it’s an attempt to put off a hard fork – a change that many in the industry believe will eventually be needed given that the network only processes 1MB of data roughly every 10 minutes.

This post was published at Coin Desk on January 28, 2016.