Bitcoin Industry Seeking to Bridge Scaling Divide at July Meeting

Members of the bitcoin industry, including major miners and developers, are set to meet in California this month, sources say.

Though details of the event are scarce, representatives from Blockstream, HaoBTC and F2Pool confirmed to CoinDesk they are planning to attend. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Jihan Wu, the CEO of bitcoin hardware firm Bitmain (which also operates the AntPool mining pool), indicated that he would be attending the gathering.

While the event's agenda is currently unknown, the Bloomberg interview suggested that the event will focus on the question of scaling, and that miners may seek a more proactive stance in the block size discussion.

Wu told the publication that he expects a resolution to the question of scaling the bitcoin network.

"There’s no way we will be at this impasse forever," he remarked.

Bitcoin startup Blockstream is also participating in the event, though a representative said that the company wasn’t organizing it. The company declined to comment on the event’s agenda or its list of attendees.

The meeting comes months after a meeting in Hong Kong between miners and several members of the Bitcoin Core development community. That meeting resulted in an agreement to submit a 2MB block size increase to Core for open consideration, but recent reports suggest that work on that proposal has stalled, enflaming tensions in the process.

The past year has seen other gatherings, including the two-part Scaling Bitcoin event, which brought together the vast majority of the world's bitcoin miners as well as a number of developers, startups and other community members, for discussion on the issue.

Secret meeting image via Shutterstock