Seven Major Bitcoin Startups Support Implementation of BIP 101

August 27, 2024 by

Seven of the leading Bitcoin wallet providers and payment companies have come to an agreement to implement the BIP 101 that would upgrade the blockchain in order to incorporate faster transaction speed along with other minor improvements.

Gavin Andresen has proposed the BIP 101 blockchain, which would go live on January 2016 with the improved parameters including an 8MB block that would automatically double itself every two years. The current 1MB block is hindering the growth of Bitcoin usages as it only allows 2-3 transactions per second.

“We have found Gavin’s arguments on both the need for larger blocks and the feasibility of their implementation – while safeguarding Bitcoin’s decentralization – to be convincing. BIP101 and 8MB blocks are already supported by a majority of the miners and we feel it is time for the industry to unite behind this proposal,” said these seven companies in a joint letter on August 24, 2015. The signatories of this letter included the CEOs of leading Bitcoin merchants, including, Stephen Pair of BitPay.com, Peter Smith of Blockchain.info, Sam Cole of Kncminer.com, Jeremy Allaire of Circle, et al. “We support the implementation of BIP101,” they added.

The letter went on to say that “we believe BIP 101 will safeguard Bitcoin’s decentralized nature while providing a reliable, immediate path toward greater network throughput, and we would like to express our support for merging BIP 101 into Bitcoin Core.”

While the Bitcoin wallet providers and payment companies are supporting the Bitcoin 101 proposal, major miners are opposing it on the ground that it would “devalue” the cryptocurrency and the exchange rate of Bitcoin would drop. The price of Bitcoin against the US Dollar has already gone down below $200 amid the new proposal.

In order to implement the 101 proposals, 75 percent of the newly mined Bitcoin blocks would be needed to be mined with the new system. Currently, only Slush Pool mines the Bitcoin with the new system, which accounts for only 1 percent of the newly mined Bitcoin blocks.

The letter claims that by January 20 the “supermajority” of the newly mined blocks would support the increase of the block size. The BIP 101 proposal would eventually increase the size of the Bitcoin block to 8GB by 2036.

Related Articles