Bitcoin Chief Developer: Scaling Issues Are Imminent, and It May Be “Game Over”

In the early morning of September 26th, Beijing time, Gavin Andresen, a Bitcoin core developer, tweeted:

The total number of nodes on the Ethereum network has surpassed that of Bitcoin. Prediction: When the size of Ethereum’s blockchain exceeds that of Bitcoin, the leadership of the Ethereum project will continue to smoothly transition.

Shuai Chu, CTO of blockchain startup VeChain and a PhD in computer science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, explained that this actually implies that the expansion of the Bitcoin network has brought about great problems, and the prediction is highly realistic. Yang Fan of Bubi Blockchain said that without new services, Bitcoin's nodes have actually converged, while Ethereum's ecology and community will gradually expand.

The Bitcoin network is limited by the size of the block. Currently, each block is 1MB in size, and the current processing capacity is about 200,000 transactions. In recent years, with the vigorous development of Bitcoin, the number of Bitcoin transactions has increased, so the free space in the block has become smaller and smaller. In May 2015, Gavin Andresen said that the problem of Bitcoin network expansion is imminent, and proposed to increase the upper limit of Bitcoin block size to 20MB through hard fork, and the time is set to be March 1, 2016 UTC time.

However, by 2016, the expansion plans proposed by the major camps could not reach a consensus. The Verge reported in March that the continued growth of Bitcoin transactions has brought a huge impact on the network. As the network processing capacity has reached its limit, transactions around the world have been delayed on a large scale, and some transactions have even failed completely. The average time required for transaction confirmation has increased from 10 minutes to 43 minutes.

Gavin Andresen said that if the number of transactions waiting is large enough, the end result will be an oversaturated network that is busy but produces nothing. "I think this may cause people to stop using Bitcoin because transaction confirmation will become less and less reliable." Because of this, a large number of followers joked and speculated: Is Gavin Andresen ready to change sides?

However, Ethereum is also facing the same problem. Recently, Ethereum founder Vitalik published a purple paper discussing the possibility of Ethereum expansion. But in fact, Shuai Chu pointed out that Ethereum currently does not have a mature working plan, and the expansion issue cannot be ignored.