Satoshi Nakamoto originally designed Bitcoin’s software to limit the block size to one megabyte. This effectively restricts the number of bitcoin transactions to about seven per second, since it takes a certain number of characters to record a given transaction, and only so many fit in a megabyte. (Visa, by contrast, routinely handles thousands of transactions per second, and claims a capacity of more than twenty-four thousand transactions per second.) Hearn anticipates that Bitcoin transaction volumes will blow past the seven-per-second limit by 2017, at the latest, creating backlogs, settlement delays, and perhaps even mass outages.
.. Problems of governance have beset Bitcoin from its inception. Notably, there have been mass resignations from the Bitcoin Foundation, the cryptocurrency’s standards body. Furthermore, some of its most prominent members have been in trouble with the law
.. He replied that “[XT] will have a different set of developers. Part of the reason for forking is to have a clear decision-making process for the software development.”
Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin
The first people Satoshi emailed privately were Mr. Back and Mr. Dai, both men have said. And Mr. Finney, who recently died, helped Satoshi improve the Bitcoin software in the fall of 2008, before it was publicly released, according to emails shared with me by Mr. Finney and his family.
.. Mr. Szabo’s writing about bit gold from that time contains many striking parallels with Satoshi’s description of Bitcoin, including similar phrasings and even common writing mannerisms. In 2014, researchers at Aston University, in England, compared the writing of several people who have been suspected to be Satoshi and found that none matched up nearly as well as Mr. Szabo’s. The similarity was “uncanny,” said Jack Grieve, the lecturer who led the effort.