Updating the Scaling Roadmap [Update]

Summary:

Paul Sztorc, a Bitcoin developer, has proposed updating the existing Core Scalability Roadmap that was created in December 2015. In his opinion, the roadmap succeeded by synchronising the entire Bitcoin community which brought finality to the conversations of that time and got everyone back to work. However, since the roadmap is now 19 months old, it is quite obsolete and needs to be replaced. The new roadmap would remove what has been accomplished, introduce new innovations and approaches, and update deadlines and projections. Paul emphasised concrete numbers, and concrete dates, and did NOT necessarily write it from his own point of view, he tried earnestly to capture a (useful) community view. The proposed roadmap includes a list of technologies which either increase Bitcoin's maximum tps rate ("capacity"), or which make it easier to process a higher volume of transactions ("scalability"). The technical community has completed a number of items on the Dec 2015 roadmap such as VersionBits (BIP 9), Compact Blocks (BIP 152), and Check Sequence Verify (BIP 112). Segregated Witness (BIP 141), which reorganizes data in blocks to handle signatures separately, has been completed and awaits activation along with Lightning Network. Transaction Compression observes that Bitcoin transaction serialization is not optimized for storage or network communication. Schnorr Signature Aggregation, which shrinks transactions by allowing many transactions to have a single shared signature, has been implemented in draft form in libsecp256k1, and drivechain, which allows bitcoins to be temporarily offloaded to 'alternative' blockchain networks ("sidechains"), is currently under peer review and may be usable by end of 2017. Alex Morcos expressed his concern about taking relatively new/untested ideas such as Drivechain and sticking them on a roadmap. Hence, Paul updated the roadmap to a "forecast" and edited the drivechain part to emphasize only that mainchain space would likely be freed as defectors leave for an alt-chain. Paul thinks people are getting hung up on the drivechain part and it can be easily taken out. He just thought that, if the plan included more overall flexibility for industry, then it would help deter network splits and scaling drama.The Bitcoin community is exploring various scaling technologies for the cryptocurrency. These include Segregated Witness (SegWit), Lightning Network, Schnorr signature aggregation, MimbleWimble's shrinking block history and drivechains. While each of these technologies has its own advantages, they may not be sufficient to solve Bitcoin's scalability problem. In that case, a hard fork to increase block size by a moderate amount may be necessary. Such an increase could take advantage of existing research on hard forks, with Spoonnet being the most attractive option. However, there is no consensus on a hard fork date yet.The above-mentioned technologies represent only a small sample of total Bitcoin innovation. The roadmap is still in draft form and feedback is requested from the community on the usefulness and accuracy of the information provided. A Google Doc link is also available for those interested.

Updated on: 2023-06-12T03:41:01.164727+00:00