The bitcoin world is all about decentralization and having developers propose different ideas to make the network stronger. In the past few years, there have been several alternative branches of bitcoin development, none of which ended up succeeding in the end. Below are some of these notorious projects and what they aimed to achieve.
Although the Bitcoin XT concept had a lot of merit and traction during the early stages, it turned out to be a rather big failure. As one would expect, Bitcoin XT can be labeled as a “fork” of bitcoin, as the developers’ vision differed from that of the Bitcoin Core coders. It was a valiant attempt to give community members a different perspective on bitcoin and how block sizes should scale.
Bitcoin XT was developed by Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, in an effort to raise the block size to 8 MB. Considering how current blocks are 1 MB in size, that is a significant increase. Chinese mining pools did not like the idea, as the local internet infrastructure. Once it became apparent Bitcoin XT would not succeed, Mike Hearn exited the bitcoin scene with a lot of fanfare to join the R3 consortium.
The second fork of bitcoin development goes by the name of Bitcoin Classic. In the early stages, a lot of miners and bitcoin companies saw the positive sides of this development solution and announced support for Classic in the process. It even appeared as if Bitcoin Classic would ultimately succeed in getting enough traction, but those hopes were cut short not too long afterward.
A large number of Bitcoin Classic nodes appeared on the network, although the vast majority were hosted from the same ISP. This “trickery” resulted in not achieving enough network support. Interestingly enough, some of the people who supported Bitcoin Classic are the ones who are trying to push Bitcoin Unlimited adoption. In fact, some of the “marketing tactics” are quite similar as well.
It is impossible to ignore Bitcoin Unlimited these days, even though some of their marketing tactics are not received in a positive manner. The ongoing debate between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Unlimited supporters has become very political as of late, and it appears both sides are losing track of what is at stake sometimes. Then again, Bitcoin Unlimited is trying to offer an alternative solution to scale bitcoin,
However, the recently discovered bug in the Bitcoin Unlimited source code cast a dark shadow over this branch of development. Although it did not affect the bitcoin protocol itself, knowing someone can shut down nodes remotely is rather disturbing. Moreover, Bitcoin Unlimited suffered from a mining error resulting in 13.2 BTC in losses. It is evident there are quite a few bugs and issues associated with BU, which do not bode well for the future of this project.
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