The US government is paying attention to the ongoing bitcoin block size debate, but is not participating in it, says Ed Felten, US Deputy Chief Technological Officer, Coinfox reported.



Felton wrote on Quora that he knows a fair amount about bitcoin and describes it as a “new kind of thing” that hasn’t existed in quite the same form before. He also acknowledges the potential of the digital currency to contribute to the social and governmental goals like financial inclusion.



He further noted the concerns raised by cryptocurrencies with respect to traditional financial and law enforcement policy issues like money laundering and consumer protection.



Coming to the block size debate, Felton said: “I am also watching with interest the debate within the Bitcoin community about the block size limit. (To be clear, the government is paying attention to that debate but are not participating in it.) This is a challenge to Bitcoin’s governance model, because it requires the community to come to a consensus on an issue where there seem to be high stakes and plausible arguments on each side.”



Last week, the first release of Bitcoin Classic version 0.11.2 was issued. Bitcoin classic seeks to raise the block size to 2MB using a hard fork. According to latest statistics from Coin.Dance, node data site, Bitcoin Classic has 841 nodes running the software at press time.



However, within two days a community of bitcoin businesses, exchanges, wallets, miners, and mining pools, going by the name ‘Bitcoin Roundtable’, released a letter saying that as contentious hard-fork carries additional risks and potentially may result in two incompatible blockchain versions, it would be extremely detrimental to the bitcoin ecosystem at present.



Another proposal called “Segregated Witness” has become increasingly popular in the bitcoin community that aims at creating 2 MB blocks, the effective size being somewhere between 1.3 MB and 1.6 MB. Bitcoin Roundtable also came out in its support saying “SegWit is almost ready and we support its deployment as a step in scaling”.