It is back to square one for Bitcoin network. It seems like the Bitcoin community just can’t make up its mind as it decided to drop the idea of adopting Bitcoin Classic. The decision was announced today by the Bitcoin Roundtable community in a blog post. The Bitcoin Roundtable is a community formed by Bitcoin miners, mining pools, exchanges, wallet providers and other Bitcoin-based businesses.
According to the post, the community has collectively come up with five key points. Any further improvement in the Bitcoin network probably will have to take into account these points in order to gain the required consensus for implementation.
The five key points according to Bitcoin Roundtable are
- There should be a modest increase in the block size, with minimal risk to the network. SegWit is a potential candidate for deployment.
- Hard-forking blockchain is out of the question as of now due to the potential risk of creating two incompatible blockchain versions. It may cause unwanted disruption of services which may lead to huge losses for everyone on the Bitcoin network.
- The Bitcoin Roundtable wants a clear roadmap for further development of Bitcoin network. The roadmap has to be created jointly by the Bitcoin Core developers and Bitcoin Roundtable representatives. The Bitcoin Roundtable members are against running any code that requires Blockchain to be hard-forked. The community urges everyone from making any decision regarding codes that involve contentious hard-fork.
- Any improvement proposals involving hard-fork should be activated only after a broad consensus is reached and there should be ample amount of time to implement such proposals.
- It is the high time for all Bitcoin contributors to bury their differences and start working together on a collaborative scaling roadmap. Without co-operation between all the parties involved, it is very difficult to come up with an amicable solution to address the block-size issue.
This announcement by Bitcoin Roundtable means Bitcoin Classic is no longer on the table as a potential solution for the block-size crisis. The Bitcoin block size will continue to be 1 MB until the community comes up with a new solution, which may take few more months or even a year.
Meanwhile, bitcoin users do not have a choice but to hold tight and hope for everything to go well. It has started to look like Mike Hearn was right all along.