Wed Aug 10, 2016 5:34 pm

According to this link , PayPal processes 4.9 Billion transactions per year.According to this graph , Bitcoin processes about 80 Million transactions per year.This is about 1.6% of what PayPal's volume is.When we compare the graph above to the one below showing an ever rising transaction fee, it is clear that the Bitcoin network has been operating at maximum capacity since around the beginning of this year. More and more uses are being priced out of the market, and being forced to use alternatives.Examples of things being forced off the bitcoin network are fantastic tools like Bitcoin faucets and birds.bitcoin.com that are no longer feasible due to the excessive transaction fees. Layer two solutions are at least many months away from widespread use, and likely several years.Now some people are even advocating a hard limit to the UTXO set! A simple immediate increase in the maximum block size to even just 8mb would instantly allow Bitcoin to scale to about 1/8th the tx capacity of PayPal, with no additional protocol efficiency improvements. It would also buy several more years of time for the network to grow while additional layer two scaling mechanisms are created.For those who are worried about "decentralization" due to increasing the block size, you seem to be ignoring the fact that Bitcoin is completely centralized and controlled by a single development team. The mining industry is completely controlled by just a small handful of mining pools, and even fewer ASIC manufacturers.As I mentioned in my previous article , the negative consequences of this block size increase are negligible when compared with the instant benefits of finally allowing Bitcoin to scale again.Recently I've been made aware of a number of industry participants and users who are planning to hard fork Bitcoin at a certain block height in order to allow it to scale. At that same time they will also likely change the proof of work algorithm to something much more ASIC resistant.This will solve the current problem of the entire ecosystem being held hostage by a single development team, and just a handful of mining pools who seem paralyzed to take action.If the current group of Bitcoin miners are not interested in following Satoshi's vision in a timely manner, my initial thought would be to support the idea of this hard fork, and to use Bitcoin.com and my influence in the ecosystem to support it. I suspect many of the biggest Bitcoin businesses will instantly follow along as well.