Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus Proposed a Hard Fork by July 2017

February 24, 2016 by
Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus Proposed a Hard Fork by July 2017

Image credit: Jason Benjamin

Besides being the International Mother Language Day, February 21 might become significant in history for another reason. Especially, among members of the Bitcoin community.

Yesterday, representatives from the bitcoin industry and members of the development community have agreed on several key points to scale Bitcoin in Hong Kong’s Cyberport and made a press release outlining their intentions.

The press release was signed by a large group of Bitcoin miners, who make up almost 80 percent of the network’s hashrate. Furthermore, representatives of major Bitcoin exchanges and several key Bitcoin Core Contributors were also among the signatories.

The Bitcoin Core team met with some of the members from China’s Bitcoin mining community in Hong Kong, and reportedly the meeting last as long as 18 hours! Sources closed to the meeting organizers said that Bitcoin Core Development Project proposed a roadmap to scale the Blockchain size. They have so far proposed to make the source code for the scaled up Bitcoin by July 2017.

However, prior to this release, a new version called Segregated Witness (SegWit) will be released in April. “SegWit continues to be developed actively as a soft-fork and is likely to proceed towards release over the next two months, as originally scheduled,” the press release outlined.

While the SegWit will be termed as a “soft fork” the press released noted that the later version will be a “hard fork” and include “features which are currently being discussed within technical communities.”

The hard fork version would include “an increase in the non-witness data to be around 2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB, and will only be adopted with broad support across the entire Bitcoin community,” mentioned the press release.

While the hard fork code will support 4 MB Blockchain size, the group said that both the SegWit and the hard fork versions will continue to be available side by side for the foreseeable future via Bitcoin Core-compatible consensus systems.

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