Author: Simon Liu 2015-08-03 07:16:11
Published on: 2015-08-03T07:16:11+00:00
Chinese miners are not opposed to an increase in block size, with five of the largest already signing a draft agreement indicating they are fine with an increase to 8 MB. The potential issue is China's international bandwidth, which is relatively low compared to other regions and could lead to higher orphan rates for non-Chinese miners if Chinese miners cease to build on top of blocks that are too large to sync in a timely fashion into China. However, intra-Asia capacity is improving all the time, and a major consortium cable called FASTER is set to come online in Q2 2016, which has a capacity of 60 Tbps, making it the highest-capacity data link ever created across the Pacific. This cable will be backed by Google, China Telecom, and others. The Chinese miners have a slight majority of the hashrate due to advantages such as cheap and accessible ASIC chips and free electricity, but their only disadvantage in competing with the rest of the world is bandwidth.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:02:12.438705+00:00