The Blockchain Scalability Survey

Bitcoin’s Scalability has been an industry debate for, arguably, years.

Things heated up with the release of ‘Bitcoin XT,’ a proposal to increase the Block-Size, which included several other upgrades in the same package. While Bitcoin was designed with scalability in mind, the specifics of how bitcoin should evolve are at the core of recent debates.

Plenty of websites track the bitcoin mining pool votes – those with the hashing capacity to vote towards a set of changes. However, due to bitcoin being decentralized in nature, there are few forums for the opinions of professionals working in the wider bitcoin blockchain community, outside of meet-ups, events, and digital communities, including BitcoinTalk and Reddit. Brave New Coin (BNC) has reached out to those with vested interests, and working in this industry, for their perspective.

How closely is the community following the voting process?

The bitcoin experiment is not just the world’s largest computer network, it is also one of the largest & most complex social experiments ever undertaken.

Finding consensus, especially when Billions of dollars are on the line, was never going to be a walk in the park. Industry members clearly desire bitcoin to be able to grow in size, allowing for more than ~7 transactions per second. Less than 20% of the respondents do not wish to increase the blocksize.

National currencies are no longer backed by gold or other hard assets, their value exists because governments guarantee them through various money mechanisms. Ultimately, having everybody believe that paper or digital money is worth something gives those currencies value. Bitcoin is not backed by a government, thus the biggest weakness the bitcoin ecosystem has is the erosion of trust in the system. The majority of survey respondents agree that the public nature of the scalability debate has effected bitcoin’s reputation and exchange rates.

Over 50% want a system in place now, that scales as required. This indicates a dichotomy in the industry between readiness and responsiveness and a general understanding that timing and execution are key.

The technical nature of the debate is such that participating in critical discussion is difficult. At the same time, over 40% are concerned that the core developers do not have sufficient experience in Economic Theory. Non-technical holders of bitcoin as an investment are among the most concerned about the current debates effect on price and reputation.

The final vote is a close call between 3 major solutions, which all propose a bigger block size. This industry vote does not match what the mining pools are voting on. A further consideration to mining pools voting power vs industry participants is a required solution for long term stability and direction. Solving that is solving the consensus question.

For now, take heed in the fact that we will have bigger blocks.

If you would like to view the full results from our survey please click below.