China is one of the largest contributors to the bitcoin network. In terms of transactions, a significantly large portion of bitcoin transactions happen in Chinese Yuan. According to last year’s statistics, about 80% of bitcoin transactions happened in Chinese yuan.
There is an ongoing debate about adoption of Bitcoin XT and BIP 101 proposed by Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn. BIP 101 or Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 101 proposes increase of block size to 8 MB and doubling it every 2 years. However, many mining pools and other members of bitcoin community have opposed this move. It has received a fair share of support too, by few big players in bitcoin industry like BitPay.
Another alternative, BIP 100 proposed by Jeff Garzik has lately been receiving a lot of support especially from the mining pools. BIP 100 allows miners to vote for increase in block size. Recently, one of the biggest Chinese bitcoin mining pool, BTCChina expressed its support to BIP 100.
With BTCChina supporting BIP 100, it now has the backing of the top three mining pools who will be dedicating a part of their network hashing power to it. While some of these BIP 100 supporters are good with the proposal to increase the block size by 8 MB, similar to that of BIP 101, BTCChina will be voting for doubling the current block size.
According to BTCChina, the mining firm has already faced issues with high orphan rate and other risks related to blockchain forking. So, it wants to play safe by voting for the block size to be limited at 2MB in place of the current 1 MB limit. It would like to understand how a sudden increase in block size limit will affect the network and mining operations before any huge changes were made to the blockchain.
BTCChina argues that the current internet capacity in China and around the world is not capable of handling a drastic 8 MB increase in block size. BTCChina is not opposed to 8 MB limit, bit it would rather go with 2 MB first and eventually pitch for further increase to 8 MB.
With mixed opinions and proposals floating around, the implementation of new block size is not finalized. Hopefully, we will be having an answer by the beginning of next year.