According to latest reports, Bitcoin Classic is moving to beta testing phase and Antpool, one of the leading mining pools, has announced that it will start testing its beta version.



“Antpool will start to test Classic soon. There is 7day long holidays ahead, so it's likely after the holidays. One node only first,” Antminer CEO Wu Jihan tweeted.



Gavin Andresen recently proposed the draft BIP that suggests a hard fork network upgrade which would increase the total amount of transaction data permitted in a block from 1 to 2Mb.



“Classic has released beta version, code changes made mainly by Gavin. Antpool will start testing Classic,” Antminer CEO Wu Jihan wrote on his Weibo page, as reported by Coinfox.



It seems that the long running debate on bitcoin block size is finally going to reach a decision. On 23 January, Chinese miners reached a consensus on 2 MB increase. The only difference between their decision and Andresen's proposal is regarding the percentage of supporters required to implement the hard fork. While Andresen vouches for 75%, Chinese miners believe that the fork requires the support of at least 90% of bitcoin’s mining community, Coinfox reported.



Bitcoin classic seeks to raise the block size to 2MB using a hard fork. On the other hand, Bitcoin Core and its Segregated Witness implementation aims at creating 2 MB blocks, the effective size being somewhere between 1.3 MB and 1.6 MB, as reported by Bitcoinist.



Bitcoin Classic has received support from major mining companies, bitcoin companies and developers including Bitmain/Antpool, BW.COM, HAOBTC.com, KnCMiner, Genesis Mining, Avalon Miner, Coinbase, Blockchain.info, OKCoin, Xapo, Bitstamp, Bitcoin.com, Foldapp, Bread Wallet, Snapcard.io, Cubits, Vaultoro, Coinify, Bitso, Bitnet, BitOasis, Lamassu, itBit and many others.