“IT’S time for a group hug,” one of the participants joked at the end. After a long and lively exchange, programmers, who write the software behind bitcoin, and “miners”, whose computers mint the digital currency, had indeed found some common ground. But the rapport between the two camps still seemed tentative. At one point a developer asked whether miners, who now mostly hail from China, would ever collude to steal bitcoin.
Suspicions between developers and miners were not the only ones on display at “Scaling Bitcoin”, a conference in Hong Kong this week. Developers themselves have been feuding, too. The event was intended to end a dispute about how to expand the capacity of the bitcoin system. Currently, it can only handle seven transactions per second—a fraction of what conventional payment systems can manage. The number could be increased by allowing bigger “blocks”—the name given to the batches into which bitcoin transactions are assembled before they are processed.
For years developers have disagreed about how much, if at all, blocks should grow. Fearing that the system would soon hit its limits,...Continue reading
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