Upgrading The Bitcoin Blockchain
Really good article on upgrades to the Bitcoin Blockchain. Has anyone caught a copy of Bitcoin Magazine in the wild? I hear Barnes & Noble has them right by the checkout which is great to hear.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/upgrading-behemoth-bitcoin-blockchain
The Behemoth, a primeval, “unconquerable beast” in the biblical book of Job. Though largely considered a myth, this beast was said to be over 300 feet in height and weighed over 80,000 metric tons. As is to be expected of such a ginormous creature, its gaits would have caused the earth beneath its feet to tremble with every step as it trudges majestically — slowly — through the land. Now you would agree that it would be physically impossible for such a beast to make any sudden turns or suddenly alter the direction of its movement, yes?
Well, the Bitcoin network can be likened to a behemoth. Some may say that it is still in its infancy seeing as it’s only 12 years old compared to other preexisting monetary systems. Well, in that case, I’ll say it’s a 12-year-old — not so much an infant — with a gigantic 360-gigabyte data repository, powering a 1.1 trillion dollar ecosystem, that has about 76 million unique addresses, and a little over 1 million of those addresses currently active as at the time of writing. Considering the age of the network, if those figures aren’t considered behemoth , then I don’t know what is.
Being a decentralized, open-source, peer-to-peer network, Bitcoin — unlike most other networks run by centralized protocols — isn’t run, nor controlled, by any single entity but by its users spread out across the globe. Because the network’s smooth running depends on complete consensus between all network users and participants, no adjustments, changes or upgrades can be made on its ever-growing 360-gigabyte database without the general approval of its participants. As a result of this, these changes or upgrades don’t happen very often. We could say that changes or upgrades can only be implemented slowly — majestically, like the movement of the Behemoth.
The last significant upgrade to the network was implemented in 2017.