Mo.. Feb. 10th, 2025

Scaling Bitocin

06decAll Day07Scaling BitocinPhase 2

Event Details

FOR THE ENGINEERING AND ACADEMIC COMMUNITY • NO EXHIBIT BOOTHS • NO DISTRACTIONS
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In recent months the Bitcoin development community has 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 are organizing a pair of 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 tradeoff 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.

Those with technical interest are invited to participate in this pair of workshops with the following intent:

Phase 1

Scene setting, evaluation criteria and tradeoff analysis.

Montreal, Canada: September 12th-13th, 2015

Scalability is not a single parameter; there are many opportunities to make the Bitcoin protocol more efficient and better able to service the needs of its growing userbase. Each approach to further scaling the Bitcoin blockchain involves implicit trade offs of desired properties of the whole system. As a community we need to raise awareness of the complex and subtle issues involved, facilitate deeper research and testing of existing proposals, and motivate future work in this area.

The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the general tradeoffs and requirements of anyproposal to scale Bitcoin beyond its present limits. Session topics are to include the presentation of experimental data relating to known bottlenecks of Bitcoin’s continued growth and analysis of implicit tradeoffs involved in general strategies for enabling future growth.

This event will not host sessions on the topic of any specific proposals involving changes to the Bitcoin protocol. Such proposals would be the topic of a 2nd, follow-on Phase 2 workshop described below; this event is intended to “set the stage” for work on and evaluation of specific proposals in the time between the workshops.

Phase 2 will be planned out further as part of Phase 1 with input from the participants.

Phase 2

Presentation and review of technical proposals, with simulation, benchmark results.

Hong Kong, SAR, China: December 6th-7th, 2015

Hopefully to be easier for the Chinese miners to attend, the second workshop pertaining to actual block size proposals will be in Hong Kong this December.

The purpose of this workshop is to present and review actual proposals for scaling Bitcoin against the requirements gathered in Phase 1. Multiple competing proposals will be presented, with experimental data, and compared against each other. The goal is to raise awareness of scalability issues and build a pathway toward consensus for increasing Bitcoin’s transaction processing capacity or, barring that, identify key areas of further required research and next steps for moving forward.

Preliminarily, phase 2 will be a time to share results from experiments performed as a result of phase 1 and an opportunity to discuss new developments.

How do the Workshops work?

  • Both events will be live-streamed with remote participation facilitated via IRC for parallel online discussion and passing questions to the event.
  • These workshops aim to facilitate the existing Bitcoin Improvement Proposals process. Most work will be done outside of the workshops in the intervening months. The workshops serve to be additive to the design and review process by raising awareness of diverse points of view, studies, simulations and proposals.
  • Travel, venue details, accommodation recommendation are available below.
  • Please see the FAQ section below, it should answer most other questions.

Travel Subsidy

There exist a number of independent or academic researchers that could be helpful to the process but are unlikely to attend due to cost. The Sponsors of this event have agreed to review applications for travel assistance, and to jointly subsidize the expense of up to $1,500 USD per person for airfare and hotel to the workshop of an estimated 15 persons. The intent is for independence and a diversity of views to be represented in a professional manner, some of which may disagree with the views of the sponsors. Those who work at a company engaged in a related business are expected to cover their own travel expenses. Exceptions could be made on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of the sponsors.

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Time

6. Dezember 2015 - 7. Dezember 2015 (All Day)(GMT+00:00)