the first day of Scaling Bitcoin focused on fostering constructive dialogue, day two moved the conversation toward defining how that dialogue would proceed following the event and how such discussion could coalesce into a clearer vision for the open-source technology's future.
Topics of discussion at the event still focused most directly on the larger question of how the bitcoin network could support increased transaction levels. However, these presentations were buoyed by musings on the trade-offs that will need to be weighed should the community want to honor the project's original democratizing vision.
For example, some of the day's talks occasionally provided a broad, analytical look at current proposals, delving into the theoretical considerations such as how much capacity the bitcoin network would need to handle at scale and how the metric of scale could be defined.
"When people talk about how bitcoin will have to scale, people throw out something about Visa processing 20,000 transactions per second or something," Harry Kalodner, of Princeton's Security and Privacy Research Group, said. "There are other relevant factors though."
Kalodner went on to suggest using the bitcoin blockchain as a domain name storage system might add 294 million transactions to the network, a figure that doesn't include expected use cases such as in the Internet of Things. "There are 245 million cars in the US," he added.
In this light, sometimes contentious approaches to blockchain design such as the Lightning Network, which seeks to add payment channels to bitcoin, and BIP 102, a proposal to increase the blocksize to 2MB, were discussed but with the goal of providing clarity as to their intent.
Full artical at:http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-future-moves-into-focus-at-scaling-bitcoin-day-2/
