Bitcoin Magazine interviews BTCC COO Miao Yongquan

BTCC statement: This report was interviewed before the Bitcoin scalability seminar. We should compare the "BIP" and "Segregated Witness" schemes more and fully understand the possible risks, but the latter seems very convincing.

On the eve of the Bitcoin scalability seminar, Bitcoin Magazine interviewed BTCC COO Samson Mow. He pointed out that before finding other solutions to expand Bitcoin, the leading mining pools and exchanges in China support increasing the Bitcoin block size limit by 8MB.

Furthermore, Miao believes that the industry could increase the block limit even if there is no consensus among Bitcoin Core developers.

“If consensus is not reached soon, I can foresee stakeholders making a decision to slightly increase the limit,” Miao said. “With larger blocks, a fee market will emerge, which will increase the cost of transactions. I think it’s too early for that to happen.”

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, the COO of BTCC, a leading Chinese Bitcoin company, explained to us that the long-running debate on block size has gone beyond discussing the block data size itself. Miao Yongquan said that in fact, it contains a deeper meaning.

"The core of this question is what will Bitcoin become," Miao Yongquan said. "If we can have an answer to the future of Bitcoin, then the conclusion of whether the block data limit should be increased will also follow. Bitcoin cannot always maintain the characteristics of free (zero transaction fees), secure and decentralized at the same time. A more extreme view is: free, secure, decentralized, choose two of the three."

Faced with this choice, like many Bitcoin "decentralization-only" people, Miao Yongquan believes that in the long run, "security and decentralization" will be the wisest choice. As more and more people stand on the side of the supporters of upgrading the block, Miao Yongquan believes that Bitcoin transactions should remain cheap and easy to use, while attracting more new users. At the same time, developers can improve the charging mechanism of the Bitcoin market and find alternative solutions for expansion, such as the Lightning Network.

“Keeping it free and secure is essential to attracting more people to use Bitcoin and increasing the total value of the market,” Miao said. “Given that we don’t have an immediate market-ready solution to scale Bitcoin, increasing the block size should be considered so that we can drive adoption in the near term.”

The proposal of Dr. Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream and inventor of Hashcash, to increase the block size by 8MB every four years makes sense to BTCC. In addition, they are also very fond of BIP 100, another standard proposed by Jeff Garzik, a Bitcoin core developer, which allows miners to vote on the block size within the 32MB hard cap.

“The ‘2-4-8’ proposal is a good short-term solution until we find a way to truly scale Bitcoin,” Miao explained. “It will allow us to make incremental progress and carefully evaluate the impact. Only by gradually increasing the block size can we fully understand its role and impact on the entire network. I also think BIP 100 is a good choice because it can flexibly increase or decrease the block size as needed. It reduces the reliance on the core developer BIP 100 to make adjustments based on market conditions, and BIP 100 can also better highlight the decentralization of Bitcoin.”

Finally, BTCC still does not consider the BIP 101 proposal. This proposal is a specific implementation of another Bitcoin solution Bitcoin XT last summer. Its procedures stipulate that if more than 75% of miners accept this change, the block data size will be increased to a maximum of 8MB. Once launched, the block data limit will double every two years for the next 20 years, and eventually reach an 8GB limit.

Although some major Bitcoin operators such as Coinbase, Bitstamp, etc. publicly support BIP 101, BTCC believes that this will increase the block size too quickly and become uncontrollable.

“BTCC will not support BIP 101. The automatic scaling mechanism in this proposal is too risky,” Miao said. “BIP 101 assumes that its block size increase process for the next 20 years is correct, which is very arrogant and reckless. For me personally, the key thing I took away from the Bitcoin Scaling Dialogue in Montreal is that we really don’t know how our network will perform after adopting larger blocks.”

BTCC is the first and largest Bitcoin exchange in China, and it serves an increasing number of countries outside of China. In addition, BTCC's mining pool accounts for 13% of the hash power of the entire Bitcoin network, and it also provides Bitcoin wallet services.

Recently, BTCC has also launched a "BlockPriority-Priority Block" service, which ensures that its users' transactions can be included in the first block mined by the BTCC mining pool.

“The ‘priority block’ service was developed to protect our users from network attacks and not be delayed due to full blocks,” Miao Yongquan explained. “Another reason is to emphasize the issue of blocks. Although the ‘priority block’ service reduces the impact of the block size debate on BTCC itself and its users, we still hope that the block size can be increased. Ideally, the market does not need a service like priority blocks at all.”