Bitcoin industry leaders have gathered for a new round of discussions on the block size limitation. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 8:
- Last week, it was reported that there was consensus on a soft and hard fork by Bitcoin mining pools and members of Bitcoin Core’s development community. To recap, the plan included scheduling Segregated Witness for April 2016 and an actual increase in Bitcoin’s block size around July 2017. The only requirement left was that remaining Core developers would agree on the plan as well. Just a little while later, Blockstream co-founder Mark Friendenbach was the first to send the new plan to the shredder. Xapo CEO Wences Casares even announced that his company would be upgrading to Classic.
- Fortunately, with every new week comes a new Roundtable nowadays. This weekend a small group of less than 75 Blockchain technology industry leaders have gathered in North America to attend the “Satoshi Roundtable”, in another attempt to reach consensus on Bitcoin’s way forward on behalf of more than 1 million users. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who has been a fierce supporter for Bitcoin Classic, is also present at the event. At the time of writing, no new agreements have been reached yet.
- Bitcoin may be about to become “real money” in yet another one of the world’s major economic economies. This time, Japan’s Financial Services Agency has proposed that virtual currencies such as Bitcoin should be treated identical to conventional money. At the moment Bitcoin is considered a commodity in Japan. FSA officials have, however, refused to confirm that this change is being considered.
- Several new Proof of Concepts using blockchain technology were revealed this week. Royal Bank of Canada is working together with Ripple to test distributed ledger-based remittances, as revealed by a new report from Deloitte. In the meanwhile, technology giant Intel is taking the blockchain to a fantasy sports game, enabling users to exchange shares of different sports teams. An official representative noted that it’s blockchain is not yet “production quality”. Lastly, Factom has announced it will be partnering with the Chinese Ancun Zhengxin, a Chinese data notarization provider, in order to explore blockchain solutions for the firm.
- The reality of not having reached a broad consensus on Bitcoin’s scalability yet quickly put an end to the coin’s brief rally. Compared with the previous week, the digital currency lost more than two percent of its value. The price per BTC is down to roughly $432. After a brief stop, the Ethereum took off again this week. The increasingly popular altcoin gained well over 40%, taking its exchange rate to about $6.39 per ETH.
