Expect ‘much bigger blocks’ for 2019, nChain’s Steve Shadders says

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Steve Shadders, director of solutions and engineering at nChain, wants to make one thing clear: there will be no more split down the road for Bitcoin SV.

On the sidelines of the CoinGeek Week Conference in London, Shadders explained why the chances of a potential split down the road for Bitcoin SV “are pretty unlikely,” saying: “The reason for that is because everyone who has come along and followed the Bitcoin SV roadmap understands that part of that roadmap is locking down the protocol. And that is all we really actually had to fight about and the only reason why there was ever going to be a split.”

Sure, there will be disagreements, but people will deal with these “by building whatever it is that they want to build and compete”—and none of these will affect the base protocol, he stressed.

For nChain, the roadmap for the next couple of months will be “much bigger blocks,” with the Teranode project taking the original Satoshi Vision to the next level. Teranode is not a monolithic “one size fit all” implementation. Instead, the project separates four core functions into a modular microservices architecture approach—making a separate Business (RPC) Layer, Network (P2P) Layer, Process Layer and Storage Layer. It will also seek to solve a technical issue that arises with a massively scaled Bitcoin network with terabyte-size blocks: how to optimize the unspent transaction output (UTXO) database maintained by nodes to prevent double-spending of Bitcoins.

Shadders, however, pointed out that collusion double-spending is highly unlikely “because it’s not in the miners’ interest to undermine the value proposition of the very coin that they get paid in.” For other types of broadcast double-spends, Shadders said there simple mitigations—just make sure that the merchant knows about it.

“Right now merchants aren’t really doing that. They’re not going out and querying the miners and we don’t have an easy mechanism for them to do that but that’s one thing that we’re planning on, not just planning we’re in progress, building right now so a merchant will be able to query multiple miners and check on the status of their transaction. They will be able to check with the miners and find out what minimum fee is required to guarantee you’re going to mine this transaction,” he explained.

Watch Steve Shadders’ presentation at CoinGeek Week’s invitation-only Miners Day event below. His presentation at the CoinGeek Week Conference can be found here.