Cryptocurrency Blog

The size of the bitcoin block has bothered a number of developers, miners, and others involved in the popular cryptocurrency. It seems that the limit of 1 megabyte as the block size means that only 7 transactions can be handled in one second. Because of the number of transactions increasing, this can cause the system to lag. On August 1, 2017, the protocol was changed making the block size limit 8 megabytes. The result was that the new currency was not the same as the bitcoin core so it had to fork into two streams of currency. The first bitcoin cash block was mined 6 hours after bitcoin’s block 478558 was mined. This was the last entry in the blockchain before mining the first bitcoin cash block. It held 6,985 transactions and was nearly 2 MB in size – 1.915 MB. Holders as of block 478558 were suddenly owners of both versions of bitcoin. If you owned a bitcoin on that date, it split into two and for every bitcoin you had, you received bitcoin cash. After that, you had bo...

Forking is when the basic protocol of bitcoin has been changed and suddenly the blockchain splits. There is a fork in the road. One of the limitations of bitcoin that seems to plague many users is the size cap on the block. One megabyte seems to be too small to make sense. In 2010, it might have been okay but in the streaming world of today, it seems to be prohibitive. Developers tried to find ways to improve bitcoin, at least to their way of thinking, their changes would be improvements. The issue is that the changes had to appeal to enough people in the crypto currency community so that the new cryptocurrency would be accepted. A shot at changing this protocol was Bitcoin XT. This forked bitcoin core which is the basis of the bitcoin network. In 2015, the plan was to allow the block to have a cap of 8 megabytes. It would increase the number of transactions that could be contained in each block. It was not a popular idea and it quickly faded and within a year, it was re...

Built into the bitcoin protocol from the beginning was a limit to the number of coins that will ever be created. The limit is 21 million. Technically, the limit is 20999999.9769, short of 21 million by 3 bitcents. Without a limit to the possible number of bitcoins, they would become like fiat money and decrease in value as more and more and more bitcoins were created. With a limit on it, bitcoin should increase in value. Bitcoin creation begins with a transaction. The transaction synchronizes with the network where it is not confirmed until it is added to a block. Any bitcoin user can initiate a transaction. There is no pattern to when or by whom transactions are broadcast to the network. Miners gather up transactions and add them to a block. A block is limited to being about 1 megabyte in size. Satoshi Nakamoto set this limit on block size in 2010. At the time, transmission speeds were lower and if the block were too big, it would slow down the syncing time and this co...