Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies - Peter Kent, Kiana Danial - Страница 131

Blocks that make up the Bitcoin blockchain are limited to 1MB in size. This limits the number of transactions that the Bitcoin blockchain can handle to seven transactions per second. New blocks occur on average about every ten minutes, but they aren’t guaranteed.

These limitations are hard-coded into the Bitcoin protocol and help ensure that the network stays decentralized. And decentralization is key to Bitcoin’s robustness. Larger blocks would impose hardships on the miners and might push out small operations.

Bitcoin has built-in limitations that prevent it from handling the global volume of monetary transactions. It is also being used to secure other types of data and systems. The demand to use the secure Bitcoin ledger is high. This difficulty is referred to as Bitcoin bloat, and it has slowed down the network and increased the cost of transactions.

At this point, most blockchain developers are only experimenting with expanding the utility of the Bitcoin blockchain. Most are not at a point where they need to scale up their prototypes and concepts so that the Bitcoin blockchain can handle their requests. Other new blockchain technologies have also helped bring down the pressure on Bitcoin and have given developers cheaper options to secure data.

Bitcoin is a living and ever-changing system. The Bitcoin core development community is actively seeking ways to improve the system by making it stronger and faster. Anyone can contribute to the Bitcoin protocol by engaging on its GitHub page (www.github.com/bitcoin). However, there is a small community of dominant core developers of Bitcoin. The most prolific contributors are Wladimir Van Der Laan, Pieter Wuille, and Gavin Andresen.