The Bitcoin blockchain is basically becoming useless for low-value, instant purchases. Frankly, if you’re ordering a beer at a bar, you’re better off using...
Today marks the official release of Bitcoin Core 0.14.0, the fourteenth generation of Bitcoin’s original software client launched by Satoshi Nakamoto eight years ago....
An often misunderstood topic is that of chain splits and how they are potentially resolved. With the recent proposal from Shaolinfry discussing User Activated...
Just when Bitcoin’s long-lasting scalability dispute appeared to have reached a deadlock, a pseudonymous mailing-list contributor may have presented a way out.Segregated Witness (SegWit),...
Segregated Witness (SegWit) is a proposed soft-forking change to the Bitcoin protocol that, among other things, increases capacity of the network. In addition to...
The central idea behind Bitcoin Unlimited — specified in “Bitcoin Unlimited Improvement Proposal 001” (BUIP001) — is to hand control of Bitcoin’s block size limit to users and miners. Or perhaps, more accurately, to make this control more explicit and easier to handle. Instead, Bitcoin Unlimited relies on a philosophy often referred to as “Emergent Consensus.”
The central idea behind Bitcoin Unlimited — specified in “Bitcoin Unlimited Improvement Proposal 001” (BUIP001) — is to hand control of Bitcoin’s block size limit to users and miners. Or perhaps, more accurately, to make this control more explicit and easier to handle. However, this control does come at the expense of Bitcoin’s strong and automated consensus mechanism. With BUIP001, there is a number of scenarios in which different users end up on different chains — either temporarily or permanently.
BUIP001 — drafted by Bitcoin Unlimited lead developer Andrew Stone — disposes of the one-megabyte block size limit protocol rule entirely, and replaces it with three configurable options. Two of these are configurable by all node operators, which include regular users as well as miners. And a third option is only for miners.
A few weeks ago, the relatively new India-based bitcoin mining pool GBMiners decided to switch their software from Bitcoin Core to Bitcoin Unlimited. Bitcoin...
