Bitcoin's Real 2018 Bottleneck

After a year of explosive price growth, forks, failed forks and more, there is much that can be said about bitcoin in 2017. Massive strides were taken, and much has been learned. However, as we push further into uncharted waters, what happens from this point onward continues to be just as divisive a topic as ever.

Underlying both much of the year’s drama and continued future uncertainty is a simple question: Can bitcoin scale as it continues to capture mainstream attention, or will it become a victim of its own success, with alternative cryptocurrencies waiting in the wings to overtake it?

Of course, no one can honestly answer this question with total certainty. Predicting the future is a messy business, because the future is constantly in flux. It is not and cannot be fixed or predetermined. Rather, the future is being shaped and created gradually in the here and now by those unsatisfied by the present.

Scaling bitcoin
At the beginning of November, one of the longest running and recognized technical conferences in the blockchain sector hosted its 2017 conference in partnership with The University of Stanford: Scaling Bitcoin.

For the fourth time, Scaling Bitcoin brought together academics, developers and entrepreneurs from across the blockchain ecosystem, many of whom have been in the thick of cryptocurrency ideas and development for years. With this long and deep experience comes a sense of perspective and order of priorities that shouldn’t be ignored.

For those looking to the future of cryptocurrency and wondering what’s preventing us from getting there, there’s no better place to start.

Immediately notable to CoinDesk Editor-in-Chief Peter Rizzo was that despite this rare concentration of industry veterans, discussion largely ignored much of the latest hot button drama dominating the cryptocurrency news cycle.

While the conference stayed true to name with presentations focusing on possible Bitcoin Core optimizations and layer 2 proposals, the controversial topics of forks and block size were seldom touched on during the course of the conference. Participants showed little apprehension for seemingly pressing controversies such as the Segwit2X fork, and most attendees, including myself, were confident that it would be dead upon arrival.

A belief and attitude that was quickly validated when 2X was canceled the very week after the end of the conference.

As a result, and for better or worse, bitcoin would not increase its base block size. The incompatible vision of much larger block size limits for bitcoin would for now embody itself only in the bitcoin cash blockchain. This has led to many predictions that bitcoin cash and other alternative cryptocurrencies will overtake bitcoin as its block size limit becomes a bottleneck for adoption.

With only a few notable exceptions, the majority of Scaling Bitcoin’s attendees did not indicate that they found this to be a notable concern. However, that is not to say that attendees were not vocal about any pressing technological challenges. If the wide ranging topics of presentations were of any indication, far from it. But one way or another all participants did agree on a single, much wider, and more fundamental concern for scaling this still nascent ecosystem: a drought of quality developer talent.