The controversial group behind several bitcoin ‘stress tests’ has confirmed it will push ahead with its biggest experiment to date. Speaking to CoinDesk, CoinWallet COO James Wilson said the test – which could reportedly cause a 30-day backlog of transactions – would be executed at 10am Thursday (GMT) next week. The mysterious group, which sees its work as a drastic but necessary demonstration of Bitcoin XT’s need, has been criticised by some users for “bullying” a live network worth several billion dollars. Its first test in June, which aimed to fill blocks with 105 BTC broken into thousands of small transactions, reached just 15% of its 200MB goal before its servers crashed. Left waiting Although Wilson did not provide any…
More than 30 Bitcoin Core developers and contributors have signed an open letter to the bitcoin community about the process of reaching a technical consensus for bitcoin scalability. Signatories on the list include current Bitcoin Core maintainer Wladimir van der Laan, Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille, tree chains developer Peter Todd and litecoin creator Charlie Lee, though former Bitcoin Core maintainer Gavin Andresen and bitcoinJ developer Mike Hearn are notably absent. The letter follows weeks of heated debate regarding whether the network should be augmented to allow for more transactions to be processed per block. The current version of Bitcoin Core processes blocks approximately every 10 minutes, with a data limit of 1MB. Andresen and Hearn are…
BitFury has announced it has completed the tape-out for its 16NM ASIC bitcoin mining chips, which were first revealed to be in production in February. The chip will achieve energy efficiency of 0.06 joules per gigahash, compared to the 0.2 joules per gigahash of its 28nm predecessor. BitFury suggested the chip will deliver “four times the compute power” of its previous 28NM chip. The startup, which has so far raised $60m in VC financing, used the announcement to tout its commitment to green energy, the strength of its immersion cooling process and what it called an ability to compete in a “new era” of bitcoin mining, in which the total computing power of the network exceeds 1,000 petahash. BitFury CEO Valery Vavilov said: “All told,…