Scaling Bitcoin

In early 2015, the Bitcoin development community faced difficult discussions of how to safely improve the scalability and decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network. To aid the technical consensus-building process, we organize workshops to collect technical criteria, present proposals, and evaluate technical materials and data with academic discipline and analysis that fully considers the complex tradeoffs between decentralization, utility, security, and operational realities. This may be considered as similar in intent and process to the NIST-SHA3 design process where performance and security were in a trade-off for a security critical application. Since Bitcoin is a P2P currency with many stakeholders, it is important to collect requirements as broadly as possible, and through the process enhance everyone’s understanding of the technical properties of Bitcoin to help foster an inclusive, transparent, and informed process. In order to facilitate wider audience participation, Scaling Bitcoin events are live-streamed with remote participation possible via IRC and WeChat for parallel online discussions and the ability to participate in live Q&A.