Why Weight? Bitcoin Scaling is Moving Beyond Block Size

“We were all busy arguing about the block size, but everything else is crucial.”
That statement, from Cornell’s Emin Gn Sirer, may have come in the middle of the second and final day of the Scaling Bitcoin conference, but it was perhaps the overriding theme of the latest edition of the digital currency network’s developer summit.
Despite the public visibility of a protest event scheduled in parallel with the conference, the content of this year’s event did much to showcase that, for many developers, the “block size” is no longer a significant factor in discussions about how the network should increase capacity.
Over the course of both days, talks largely moved on to more incremental discussion of the various “trade-offs” that should be considered when making changes to bitcoin’s basic components – and the complex ways they interact.
Bitcoin Core developer Eric Lomborozo told CoinDesk:
“All engineering requires trade-offs. We’re trying to figure out the range of possibilities and what trade-offs are more preferable.”
Still, Lombrozo acknowledged that the block size (and the pronounced and public feud over whether to change the hard-coded limit to the number of transactions bitcoin can process with each batch of transactions) remains a “cultural phenomenon”, one its technical community is still trying to move forward from as it navigates a market now dominated by blockchain solutions.

This post was published at Coin Desk on October 9, 2016.