The Bitcoin Scalability Roadmap, proposed by Gregory Maxwell in the recently held Scaling Bitcoin conference earlier this month has received a response from fellow Bitcoin Core members – Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik. The proposal urges Bitcoin Core developers to start working on a soft fork with segregated witness based 4 MB block increase.
The Maxwell roadmap has been already accepted by over 31 core developers by signing the proposal. However Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik, who also form the Bitcoin Code member group have expressed their apprehensions about the proposal. According to the duo, Maxwell’s Bitcoin Scalability Roadmap has few really good points, but at the same time it fails to address certain issues. They believe that the new roadmap does not make any allowances for the Bitcoin network to adopt new economic policies. Also, the roadmap does not take into account all bitcoin users and it is focused more towards certain stakeholders of the Bitcoin community.
It is already known that as number of transactions over the bitcoin network increases, the transaction fee also sees a significant jump, especially when the block size remains constant. Given the current circumstances, it is bound to happen. Increased transaction fee will effect the bitcoin users and in turn may affect bitcoin as a currency itself.
They are also concerned that the Scaling Bitcoin workshops haven’t been of much use when it comes to solving the block size issue. The whole point of launching the Scaling Bitcoin series of workshop was to find possible solutions to improve the bitcoin blockchain, including the block size issue. Even after few workshops, no one has reached to a consensus about the block size and transaction fee issues.
It is imperative that the bitcoin community reaches a consensus soon. If these issues pertaining to block size and transaction fees are left hanging for long, it may put the whole Bitcoin Network into jeopardy.