Leading Bitcoin Blockchain infrastructure provider and transaction processing company BitFury has announced their support for 2 megabyte block size increase with Bitcoin Classic.
“BitFuryGroup – the largest private miner and security provider is ready to move forward and support 2MB increase with Bitcoin Classic,” announced BitFury Group co-founder and CEO Valery Vavilov.
Currently, over 72% of mining pools support Bitcoin Classic. Amongst them, BitFury which controls around 13% of the mining share have contributed the third largest mining pool support behind AntPool and F2Pool. The largest mining pools and transaction processors in the industry including KnCMiner have also showed strong support for the 2 megabytes block size increase proposal.
Essentially, Bitcoin Classic is a temporary solution to double the Bitcoin block size until a better solution is found. Due to the misinterpretation from the mainstream media regarding the controversial statement of former Bitcoin lead developer Mike Hearn, the Bitcoin community strongly proposed an implementation of a temporary system, instead of gearing towards a hard fork.
“We call our code repository Bitcoin Classic. It starts as a one-feature patch to bitcoin-core that increases the blocksize limit to 2 MB. We will have ports for master and 0.11.2, so that miners and businesses can upgrade to 2 MB blocks from any recent bitcoin software version they run,” explains the team.
Leading Bitcoin companies, developers, investors, and miners such as Coinbase, Bitstamp, Circle, Jeff Garzik, Roger Ver, and Gavin Andresen have publicly announced their support for Bitcoin Classic.
“It’s not about bitcoin Classic winning and Core losing, it’s about moving to a world with many competing forks. Competition drives progress,” said Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong.
The Hearn Controversy
Mike Hearn, in his statement published on Medium, claimed that the Bitcoin community is being fairly ignorant towards the block size debate and disregarding the issues of full blocks and delayed transactions. He emphasized that transactions are significantly delayed on commercial platforms, due to the rapidly growing number of transactions.
“It’s ludicrous that people are actually writing posts on reddit claiming that there is no crisis. People were criticizing my post yesterday on the grounds that I somehow overstated the seriousness of the situation. Do these people actually use the bitcoin network to send money everyday?,” said Hearn.
Despite his strong beliefs, Bitcoin transactions are being processed seamlessly, with 10 minutes of confirmation time and around US$0.02 miners fee on average. Thus, implementing a hard fork is not an urgent issue to address.
Instead of creating a potentially dangerous environment for the Bitcoin network by forcefully implementing a hard fork, many companies and mining firms believe that by implementing a soft fork and increasing the block size to 2 megabyte, it will allow the community and developers to observe the results of an alteration in the network and spend more time in developing an improved proposal.
Since the world’s largest mining pools, companies, and experts are beginning to strongly engage in the implementation of Bitcoin Classic, the community predicts the majority of miners to support the 2 megabyte proposal in the upcoming weeks.