CoinFox asked Dominik Weil, a co-founder of Bitcoin Vietnam, to comment on the block size debate.

Dominik Weil: It is a pity that the Bitcoin community has become very divisive about the topic. We hope that Bitcoin would once again prove that it is truly "antifragile".

We were observing this discussion since more than a year - and while we remained pretty neutral on the topic for quite some time, we have decided by now to support the "Bitcoin Classic" initiative and hope the blocksize is increased rather sooner than later.

The reason why we support Bitcoin Classic is that we are already feeling the limited capacity of the bitcoin blockchain. It is wonderful that Bitcoin usage is increasing so sharply that we have this kind of problem at all – but the limited block size is hurting us.  And its gets worse every day.

We were recently forced to increase the withdrawal fees from our exchange (VBTC bitcoin exchange - Editor's Note) to 0.2 mBTC in order to cover the increased network transaction fees; while it took us last week at one point over one hour to receive a 4 BTC transaction which was sent with "only" the normal transaction fee of 0.1 mBTC. At peak times we were paying up to ca. 30 USD Cent per transaction. If you operate on a very low margin in a very competitive environment – it is very bad.

While I appreciate for sure the technical skills of the current Bitcoin core team and all the work they have put into the project, I fear that their understanding of economic incentives and the actual business & customer needs is somewhat limitied. You can have the most beautiful and strong code – but if the economic incentives you are setting don't align with what is asked by the market, you will be overtaken by a competitor which is serving the market needs in a better way.

While right now Bitcoin has for sure the network effect still going for it and we certainly hope that Bitcoin will be winning out in the end – we will be definitely observing if at some point another blockchain technology will gain some serious traction, while providing us with lower fees & higher transaction throughput. Even if we all love Bitcoin, we are not married to it either. If Bitcoin continues to go down the path of making transactions increasingly expensive / prolonging the waiting time for the first confirmation, we certainly will have to be open to other implementations which will serve our and our customers needs in a better way.

Bitcoin is not acting in a vacuum. We are facing serious competition from established players as well as, potentially, other uprising cryptoprojects, which can fulfil the dream of a decentralized, trustless global P2P-Payments network with low fees and strong security. This is the vision we signed up for – and why we actually decided to create this company in the first place – so it is certainly somewhat natural that we are inclined to stick to the original vision.

Bitcoin won't achieve to be some kind of “digital gold” if the network is clogged. It is a problem right now - and if people say it isn't, I wonder if they actually use Bitcoin in real life business transactions with customers on a daily basis. 

Last but not least: Even if all of the "horror scenarios" we have heard about a rising blocksize might be true – a modest hike to 2MB certainly won't destroy the network and will give us a lot of valuable datapoints to actually see the effects of an increased blocksize to certain metrics. We hope that all the “nightmare scenarios” won't come true but if the skeptics of a blocksize increase are right, they also will have valuable data points to prove their point of what actually happens to the network when the blocksize is increased.

Alexey Tereshchenko