BitFury Now Supports Bitcoin Classic and 2-Megabyte Block Size Seems to be Winning the Battle

January 20, 2016 By: Asif Imtiaz

Although a bit late to the party, BitFury has finally announced that they will be supporting 2-megabyte block size increase with Bitcoin Classic.

The announcement came from the Twitter account of BitFury Group’s co-founder and current Chief Executive Officer, Valery Vavilov. “@BitFuryGroup – the largest private miner and security provider is ready to move forward and support 2MB increase with @Bitcoin Classic,” said Mr. Vavilov.

The original Bitcoin core currently only supports a 1-megabyte block size, which many experts believe to be one of the key reasons why Bitcoin is having a hard time competing with traditional financial transaction services. Because of the low block size of the original Bitcoin code, it can only process a tiny number transactions compared to credit card companies.

Since Bitcoin classic came into reality, most major miners and Bitcoin exchanges have adopted their 2-megabyte Blockchain. With BitFury, the process of adopting the new standard will only accelerate. Industry insiders claimed that most major miners will start supporting the Bitcoin classic within a month.

Although 2 megabytes would effectively double the transactional capability of the Blockchain, initially, users were considering a much higher size. Bitcoin classic claims on its website that “consensus amongst miners for an immediate 2 MB increase, and demand amongst users for 8 MB or more.”

“We call our code repository Bitcoin Classic. It starts as a one-feature patch to bitcoin-core that increases the block size limit to 2 MB. We will have ports for master and 0.11.2, so that miners and businesses can upgrade to 2 MB blocks from any recent bitcoin software version they run,” they further explained.

Hence, this upgrade by BitFury and other miners would likely be a temporary measure and we may see a further increase to the block size in near future.

Commenting on the implementation of the Bitcoin classic by major miners, the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, said that “It’s not about bitcoin Classic winning and Core losing, it’s about moving to a world with many competing forks. Competition drives progress.”