Blockstream Co-Founder Submits a Proposal To Decrease Bitcoin Block Size

By Swati Kishore

The Co-Founder of the Blockchain Technology company Blockstream, Luke DashJr, has recently submitted a proposal for the temporary decrease in the size of the Bitcoin Block to less than half of what it is currently. The proposal has caused disturbance among the Bitcoin Developers Community.

The proposal, which seeks to decrease the Bitcoin Block size from 1 Mb to 300 Kb, is available on Github.

The implementation of the soft work would commence from August of this year and will last until the end of December.

Why the proposal has raised so many concerns is because the Block size reduction in the already slow Bitcoin Blockchain would entail that a smaller number of transactions are processed.

The number of transactions processed has been a hot topic among the Bitcoin community, with many members stating that the 1 Mb limit only curtails the Blockchain network scalability.

Even though the voices against a potential Block size reduction are loud, however, Luke Jr supports his proposal by explaining that it has been strategically planned to enhance communication between different nodes, serve the interest of the miners, and encourage the growth of fully validating nodes.

An analysis by Trust Nodes highlights the fact that Block size reduction could, in fact, optimize the communication between different nodes by decreasing the growth of the Bitcoin Blockchain’s already massive volume. However, TrustNodes elaborates that it may not be the only solution or the best. As per TrustNodes,

“As history will only increase, the system in its current design is unsustainable. The “crazy” suggestion by Luke DashJr, therefore, might not be that crazy, just impractical. Putting aside considerations of how this would affect the usability of the network, a decrease of the block size by 3x would only slow down the growth by 3x.”

The issue of scalability has been a major concern for the developers of different Blockchains. The developers of the Bitcoin Blockchain tried to address the issues through the hard fork that culminated in the birth of Bitcoin Cash.

The Bitcoin developer team aimed to preserve the Block size limit and rather focus on the optimization of transactions through different technologies; the Bitcoin Cash team, on the other hand, wanted to increase the number of Blocks. The BCH team proposed the Lightning Network which will facilitate a higher number of transactions at the minimal cost.

Despite Luke DashJr’s standing in the Bitcoin Developer Community, it is unlikely that the proposal will see the light of the day because the reactions of the developers have mostly been negative.