Takeaways from the "scaling bitcoin + hosting & infrastructure" round table at Scaling Bitcoin in Montreal, September 12, 2015.
- we had very good representation from major bitcoin infrastructure companies
- large fraction, if not majority, of bitcoins held, bitcoins transacted and bitcoin API calls made
- everyone wants the block size to increase - only a question of how
- remarkable that infrastructure companies universally agreed on hard forking bitcoin
- some infrastructure companies to run implementations of bitcoin other than Bitcoin Core
- meaning Bitcoin Core may have less influence than usually thought
- we also know that some miners have done SPV mining - so what fraction of miners are actually using Bitcoin Core's ruleset?
- lately, wallets have had difficulty computing fees - what happens if different wallets disagree? - stress tests cause issues
- some infrastructure companies have collaborated with miners to get some specific transactions mined
- indication that p2p network isn't working as intended
- infrastructure considered starting a mining pool that they shared to get their preferred transactions mined
- it's not just about changing the max block size, but proving to the world that "we" can agree on changing a critical feature like this
- what is the primary use-case of bitcoin? we didn't have a good answer for this one. is buying coffee from starbucks a good reason to increase the block size?
- we could either wait for the damage to occur to due limited block size and repair it later, or repair it in advance
- seemed not totally agreed on this, except that perhaps the damage has already occurred, since we are now all in agreement about increasing the block size