Topic: [2017-06-25]Scheduled Scaling Updates for the Bitcoin Network Are Getting Closer (Read 2914 times)

Over the past six months, the bitcoin scaling debate has been going on relentlessly as many cryptocurrency proponents are trying to figure the best solution to improve the network’s fees and transaction throughput. There have been many ideas brought to the table, but this summer there are some specific plans that all bitcoin holders should keep on their radar.
Bitcoin Scaling Changes and Three Possibilities

The block size debate has been going on since Satoshi Nakamoto put a 1MB limit on blocks in 2010, which only allows for a certain amount of transactions per block. More recently the ‘community’ has been divided talking about a variety of ideas that could help blocks hold more transactions as bitcoin becomes increasingly more popular.

One of the ideas right now is Segregated Witness (Segwit), a soft fork protocol designed to remove witness data from transactions which theoretically will add more space for additional transactions. Then the other side of the community wants to implement a hard fork that would change the 1MB block size limit to either 2MB, 4MB, 8MB, or even unlimited block space.

For a long time now Bitcoin proponents have yet to implement any of these plans. There has been a stalemate for quite some time between businesses, users, miners, and many individuals involved in the bitcoin economy. Now certain members of the bitcoin community seem to be moving a lot closer to attempts towards activating their plans on the bitcoin network.

UASF (user activated soft fork)

Scheduled Scaling Updates for the Bitcoin Network Are Getting CloserUSAF or BIP 148 stands for a “user activated soft fork,” which is an idea that proposes full nodes can activate Segwit on the bitcoin network. The concept was first introduced in February by an anonymous pseudonym named Shaolinfry. The creator of UASF believes Segwit can be implemented on the network by utilizing the vote of full nodes similar to the P2SH soft fork (BIP16) that took place in the past. However, BIP 148 is a fork that will also require miners to deploy the existing Segwit protocol.

“‘Flag Day’ — Prior to August 1st, 2017, miners should either; update their node software to a BIP148-enforcing version; or run a BIP148 border node to filter out invalid blocks, and update their existing mining software to produce blocks with version 1 bit enabled, to vote for Segwit activation,” explains the UASF Working Group website.

On forums and social media, there seems to be a good following of people who support the UASF movement, while others would disagree and say there isn’t much BIP 148 support at all. As far as node count is concerned, there are 918 nodes signaling BIP 148 out of 7441 total full bitcoin nodes at the time of writing. The UASF Working Group website and many others within the community have also admitted to the fact that UASF can split the bitcoin blockchain.
read more:https://news.bitcoin.com/scheduled-scaling-updates-for-the-bitcoin-network-are-getting-closer/