Bitcoin core developer Luke Dash Jr has presented his version of a potential Bitcoin scaling roadmap at LABitConf in Chile this week.

His roadmap includes a number of active scaling projects such as the Lightning Network, confidential transactions, and decentralised sidechains.

Dash Jr also continued his support of the controversial stance to reduce the block size limit (to under 1MB) in a move to “make Bitcoin sustainable”.

There are many ways to define what it actually means to be a Bitcoin ‘core developer’, but I would consider one way to become part of this famous group would be to have at least 1 commit to the Bitcoin repository on GitHub. According to the latest data, we can see that Luke Dash Jr is currently the most prolific contributor to this repository with 341 commits since 2010.

Blockstream features heavily

Dash Jr’s proposed roadmap includes a lot of alignment with many active Blockstream projects, like the Lightning Network and Liquid sidechains.

He thinks that Lightning can deliver “instant and real P2P transactions using less space”.

His call for decentralised sidechains is a possible solution for mining centralisation. Blocksteam’s Liquid sidechain can also deliver on confidential transactions and make use of their new Simplicity release.

This high-assurance smart contracting language aims to provide flexibility and expressiveness for smart contract computations. Dash Jr believes that this allows for “safer smart contracts, with turing-like flexibility”.

Defending smaller blocks

Dash Jr has long been an advocate for a move to smaller blocks. He thinks this move will contribute to the sustainability of the BTC blockchain as it would make sure that scaling is achieved through layer 2 solutions – instead of just increasing the block size limit to achieve linear scaling on the layer 1 chain.

The big block debate led to the eventual split of the Bitcoin protocol, as ‘big-blockers’ hard forked to create the Bitcoin Cash chain. Of course, over the past few weeks, we have again seen another split as Bitcoin SV wants to move more aggressively to ‘on-chain’ scaling with blocks potentially as large as 2GB.

After the roadmap was posted on Reddit, Dash Jr came to the forum itself to defend his call for smaller blocks.

He said: “The block size is larger than the rate of technological improvement. It’s not sustainable. We’re at 200GB now, and will get to 300GB in a year. There are already too few full nodes, and we’re just making it harder and harder to set them up!”

In response to the article on Reddit, Luke Dashjr did want to clarify that he “wasn’t making a proposal, just going over different things Bitcoin is, or could be doing in the future.”