Bitcoin XT Fails To Get Consensus At Its Commencement Date

Bitcoin XT or BIP-101 (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal -101), put forward by two Bitcoin Core developers – Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, had 11 January as the date to commence introducing larger 8MB blocks to bitcoin users running the XT software, CoinDesk reported.

The implementation of the project required 75 percent of all the bitcoin node owners to adopt XT, which would have increased the block size from the present 1MB up to 8MB, and doubling every two years until a block size of 8GB was reached.

However, this didn’t happen and on 11 January, only 10 percent of total nodes converted to XT. CoinDesk reported that in spite of support from some prominent companies in the bitcoin space such as Coinbase, BitPay, Circle and Blockchain, there was not much consensus among bitcoin's miners.

In an email to CoinDesk, Hearn said that he still believes capacity to be a problem on the bitcoin network. He pointed out that bitcoin's miners have shown a willingness to align with decisions made by bitcoin's Core developers.

"Bitcoin can't be credibly described any longer as a decentralised system. In how it operates and how much influence users and merchants have, it is indistinguishable from any other proprietary payment network," he added.

Taking bot data and comments from the bitcoin community into account, there is not much possibility seen that 75% of nodes will switch to XT in the future.

"It appears that most miners are in agreement that BIP101 is too much too fast and tries to predict too far into the future what an appropriate block cap will be," CoinDesk quoted BitGo engineer Jameson Lopp. "Bitcoin has a strong status quo – XT has shown just how difficult it is to overcome."

Andresen told CoinDesk that the bitcoin community should tell developers about the software they are using what they want. “If the software developers can't or won't give it to them, then they should switch software," he said.