ViaBTC publicly expressed interest in block size expansion and Bitcoin Unlimited, and received widespread praise

Large mining pool ViaBTC recently publicly expressed its interest in Bitcoin block size expansion and the Bitcoin Unlimited development plan.

ViaBTC: We are the 5th largest mining pool in the world, running the Core client, and we are very interested in large-capacity blocks.

Andrew Stone (Bitcoin Unlimited developer): Great, I’d love to help deploy the Bitcoin Unlimited client to your network.

ViaBTC’s comments on social media have been widely circulated in the Bitcoin community. Many Bitcoin users have expressed their support for ViaBTC. In addition, some developers have volunteered to help deploy the Bitcoin Unlimited client on its network.

As the world's fifth largest mining pool, any decision made by ViaBTC is very influential. However, the mining pool was established less than two months ago.

Although ViaBTC is young, it has been able to quickly grow into a large mining pool, and it seems that most of the hash rate growth has been concentrated in the last month.

About 24 hours after ViaBTC posted the tweet, the mining pool’s market share increased significantly, climbing from the fifth place to the second place in an instant (note: the data at that time is different from now), and even surpassed BTCC and Antpool. However, ViaBTC is still running the Bitcoin Core client.

Users speculated that the reason for the sharp increase in ViaBTC's computing power was the miners. Some miners were very uneasy because large mining pools such as HaoBTC had repeatedly expressed their support for block expansion but never took any practical action.

Concerns about ViaBTC’s comments

Although the increase in ViaBTC’s hashrate may be caused by miners and users, the Bitcoin community is still concerned about its remarks, because no one knows whether ViaBTC will really adopt Bitcoin Unlimited or other solutions to take practical actions to expand capacity.

Only when ViaBTC truly adopts Bitcoin Unlimited will it be able to accurately evaluate and discuss the potential advantages and disadvantages of the client for miners and the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin Unlimited is growing rapidly

ViaBTC’s support for Bitcoin Unlimited and block size increases is great news for client diversification.

Recently, Bitcoin Unlimited received $500,000 in donations and officially registered as a non-profit organization. Since then, Bitcoin Unlimited has released its development roadmap, which has been widely praised by the community.

Regarding the block capacity issue, the community is extremely polarized. Although the community has long agreed that 1MB capacity is conducive to network security, the status of this consensus has been shaken in recent months.

Since 2014, the discussion on the Bitcoin block capacity has never stopped, because the community believes that the block capacity is closely related to the development of Bitcoin. Those who support block expansion believe that the current block capacity will limit Bitcoin's scalability, and the number of transactions on the entire network is constantly increasing. 1MB capacity will only cause the network to crash. Opponents of expansion worry that the increase in block capacity will lead to centralization, and Bitcoin will no longer be safe.