Statement From Calvin Ayre and CoinGeek About Bitcoin Protocol

LONDON, August 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

CoinGeek is committed to global success of the original Bitcoin (now restored in the form of Bitcoin Cash BCH), and that requires restoring the Bitcoin protocol to its original design. Once restored, the Bitcoin protocol should be locked so that businesses and developers around the world can reliably build on top of it - just as they do on the Internet protocol. This will help professionalize the Bitcoin ecosystem to enable its next stage of growth.

In keeping with these goals, here is a statement of consensus changes that CoinGeek, as a significant miner, will support in the November 2018 protocol upgrade:

1. Continuing the program to re-enable the original set of op codes. Specifically for November, CoinGeek supports re-enabling: OP_MUL, OP_LSHIFT, OP_RSHIFT and OP_INVERT
2. Removing the current limit of 201 op codes per script
3. Raising the maximum block size to 128MB

We note that additional changes have been proposed by several implementation teams that are not part of the original Bitcoin protocol. We will not support the following changes or commit our hash power to running software that implements them:

1. OP_DATASIGVERIFY
2. Canonical transaction ordering (We are committed to investigating the removal of topological ordering as a potential barrier to scaling but this requires more detailed examination)

In the longer term, CoinGeek will continue to support only consensus changes that restore the original Bitcoin protocol, and those that may be demonstrated as absolutely necessary to meeting the goal of massive on-chain scaling to terabyte+ blocks.

This can be broadly summarized as removing all of the artificially imposed limits and restoring previously-disabled functionality where safe to do so. Limitations on protocol parameters such as block size should be determined by miners in a competitive spirit. The natural tension between the economic incentive to handle unbounded limits and the technical challenges to doing so are how we envisage Bitcoin miners governing these limits. Investment equals competitive advantage. As we previously announced, CoinGeek believes in miner choice, and a healthy competitive marketplace for miners.