There is a huge debate going on the bitcoin scaling issue in the bitcoin world but most of the common bitcoin users are either confused or not even aware of what is happening behind the scenes. Those who are engaged in bitcoin adoption to common users are still considering it as the best currency in the world despite of practical and serious problems occurring to Bitcoin very regularly these days.
In last 2 weeks bitcoin has gone through series of events which has raised a lot of concerns for its future and especially for the investors who have invested huge amount of money in it hoping that its value will increase. I will summarize all possible events to give snapshot of them and try to provide as simple solution for common man as possible so that at least investments of common man can be saved.
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But what exactly is the issue?
Technically problem lies in a specific parameter called the “block size limit.” The current limit is 1 MB which is insufficient for the ever-growing transaction intensity. In general terms, Bitcoin can handle from 3 to 7 transactions per second as compared to 24000 transactions per second by Visa.
So one problem is that bitcoin cannot compete or scale up to 24000 transactions per second with given block size limit of 1 MB. But the demand and mainstream adoption is increasing very fast for Bitcoin since it has become universal currency to buy other cryptocurrencies and at the same time, being accepted by hundred thousands of merchants worldwide as a global currency. Transaction fees and transaction confirmation time is increasing day by day until block size is increased. Transaction fees has increased from 1–2 cents to 30–40 cents or even few dollars some days. Transaction confirmation time has increased from 10 mins to few hours and few days in fact which is very frustrating and at the same time killing the real use case for what Bitcoin was made.
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Other problem which is more worrying the whole bitcoin and blockchain community that in order to scale the bitcoin, the bitcoin developer community has divided up in two groups and both groups are playing the blame games both technically and politically to prove themselves right. Currently one team has proposed “Segwit” as the soft fork solution of bitcoin and other team has proposed “Bitcoin Unlimited” as the hard fork solution of bitcoin. The network has become really congested and needs an immediate scaling solution for bitcoin to survive.
To be continued.
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