You may have heard that there has been some disagreement in Bitcoinland about how to move forward on increasing the scale of the Bitcoin transaction network.

One new offshoot of the reference implementation for the Bitcoin Core software is now going by the name “Bitcoin Classic”. The motivation behind this recently code-forked project is:

The data show consensus amongst miners for an immediate 2 MB increase, and demand amongst users for 8 MB or more. We are writing the software that miners and users say they want. We will make sure that it solves their needs, help them deploy it, and gracefully upgrade the bitcoin network’s capacity together.

In other words, some participants want to move forward on a relatively simple-to-understand code change (adjusting the maximum allowed bitcoin block size), with a great deal of hope and faith that the impact of such a change will pose no significant risks to the miners who adopt it and the users they serve.

The proposed change in this code-fork is implemented in jtoomim’s pull request, which includes changes to a few constants related to sizes and times that users of Bitcoin Classic would diverge from the rest of the network. Eventually, the code would change the defaults to allow an effective block size of 4MB. The Bitcoin Classic project site, however, does not provide a roadmap, an analysis of the impact of the proposed changes, or references to any performance or reliability impact studies that would assuage the fear that problems may arise during the proposed block size increases.