A $500,000 initiative to incentivize miners to upgrade Bitcoin’s block size has received substantial support on social media.
273 Bitcoins To Break The 1MB Mold
The so-called ‘Save the chain’ transaction, attached to which is 273.99971476 BTC in fees, is only mineable once nodes upgrade to include transactions over 1 megabyte in size.
Included are 99,940 zero-value anyone-can-spend outputs.
“This allows anyone, with zero trust required, to create a descendant transaction to add to the incentive for miners to increase the maximum block size limit,” Reddit user /u/SaveTheChain explained in introductory comments.
They continued:
This transaction is considered “non-standard” by most full node software. Therefore, miners need to customize their node software to mine this transaction. Additionally, nodes will not broadcast this transaction or any of its descendant transactions… For now, descendant transactions will need to be published by other means (such as a comment here).
A Counterpoint To Scaling Wars?
The latest user-generated cause to force a decision in the Bitcoin scaling debate comes as the cycle of infighting and insult-trading among well-known industry figures continues unabated.
I was wrong; stay away from Blockstream, Greg and Samson are toxic trolls.
— Gavin Andresen (@gavinandresen) May 2, 2017
This week saw former Bitcoin Core developer turned Bitcoin Unlimited proponent Gavin Andresen call Blockstream’s Greg Maxwell and Samson Mow “toxic trolls.”
Blockstream came in for further criticism from big block supporter Rick Falkvinge, the Swedish Pirate Party founder claiming the company’s support of SegWit was due to an interest in filing patents associated with the technology.
Maxwell and Blockstream founder Adam Back both subsequently denied Falkvinge’s accusations.
As Bitcoin continues to hit new record highs and commentators highlight strong underlying metrics such as investment, it appears the ongoing stalemate is affecting sentiment less and less.
SavetheChain’s most popular supporter meanwhile came in the form of Ledger Journal editor Peter Rizun, who described it as “awesome work” and wrote:
Now we need someone to make a website where people can submit children transactions with high miner fees, and the website can track the growing pot available to the miner (or miners) who includes them. It would be good publicity for the big-block cause.
Current statistics show a slight lead in miner support for Bitcoin Unlimited over Bitcoin Core, the two solutions receiving 38.3% and 35.9% respectively.
What do you think about SaveTheChain’s transaction offer? Let us know in the comments below!
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