Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong Edition

Last month I had the unique chance to travel to Hong Kong and attend the Phase 2 of the Scaling Bitcoin Workshop.

The purpose of the workshop is to present and review actual proposals for scaling Bitcoin against the requirements gathered in Phase 1. Multiple competing proposals were presented, with experimental data, and compared against each other.

The 2 day event kicked off on Sunday, December 6, 2015. I’m very excited to report that a great progress was made since Phase 1, and it looks like we plenty of paths for how we can move on and scale the Bitcoin network so that it can support more users.

A very interesting announcement was the one made by P. Wuille about the progress in the area of Segregated Witness. Segregated Witness appears to help the scalability of the Bitcoin protocol in a many ways. I hadn’t heard Segregated Witness before. It seems that is is able to fix transaction malleability, and soft-fork an effective block size increase to ~4 MB.

Lightning Network also seems to be the future, with instant payments and cross-chains support. Tadge Dryja explained that there are several variants we may see, though given that Segregated Witness should arrive soon.

In this phase of Scaling Bitcoin, a miner’s panel was organized with a total of 8 members, which apparently they were holding over 90% of the total Bitcoin hashpower :O

The mining panel, with AntMiner, Slush, FinalHash, BTCC & BitFury, and others.

It was a very interesting conference overall. Many many thanks to the organizers and the sponsors of the conference for the sponshorship I received in order to attend :)