Much has been made lately of the debate revolving around the Bitcoin block size. For the uninitiated, a block is found by the network approximately every ten minutes and contains in it a record of all (or most) of the transactions to have occurred over the network since the last block was found. Now this has been a mostly unchanged part of the Bitcoin protocol since it was first introduced in 2009. However, in the past year the network has seen a steady increase in the number of transactions occurring on the network. This has led to a technical problem where, in some instances, not all transactions that have occurred since the previous block can be included in the most recent block. (more…)