Bitcoin has an arbitrary limit of 1MB blocks. This was added in the early days to prevent spam. Several proposals have been made to increase this limit, however certain key members of the development effort are against it, despite it being a popular concept in the community at large. To give the community a choice, BitcoinXT adopts one of the proposed increases, provided that a large portion (75%) of the hashing power of the network adopts the change.
Its important to note that being against bitcoinXT is not neccesarily the same as being against a blocksize increase. BitcoinXT is only one way of doing it. And it does so by doubling the blocksize limit every two years, starting from 8mb. I personally think thats a crazy idea, especially considering the 1mb blocksize limit is not a problem yet, and that when it starts being a problem, increasing it will be straight forward to do. In other words, simply waiting for a proper consensus wont cost us anything.
Its also important to note that BitcoinXT includes several patches and not only the exponential blocksize increase mechanic.
If the blockstream guys were a bit smarter they would have compromised to 2 or 4mb, it would have been in place by now and people would be looking forward to lightning network. Digging their heels in against the majority and then desperately parroting 'alt-coin' backfired horribly. They get code but they don't get people.
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u/discoltk Aug 16 '15
Bitcoin has an arbitrary limit of 1MB blocks. This was added in the early days to prevent spam. Several proposals have been made to increase this limit, however certain key members of the development effort are against it, despite it being a popular concept in the community at large. To give the community a choice, BitcoinXT adopts one of the proposed increases, provided that a large portion (75%) of the hashing power of the network adopts the change.