Bitcoin network reaches max capacity, causes transaction delays

The average time to confirm a transaction has ballooned from 10 minutes to 43 minutes. Users are left confused and shops that once accepted Bitcoin are dropping out.

Bitcoin transactions are confirmed every time miners create a new block on the networks chain. Each block takes about ten minutes to mine, and can hold 1MB of information. At current volumes, there are more than 1MB worth of transactions asking to be confirmed in that time. To solve this bottleneck, many in the Bitcoin community have called for increasing the block size to 2MB.

This sounds simple, but has proven to be a highly contentious issue. A schism has developed between the team in charge of the original codebase for Bitcoin, known as Core, and a rival faction pushing its own version of that open source code with a block size increase added in, known as Classic.

Anyone can cast a vote for their preferred code by running a Bitcoin node powered by that software. But the miners provide the computing power that will decide the winning code, kind of like delegates in a US presidential election. Most of the largest Chinese miners, representing the majority of mining resources, have thus far sided with Core.

Both sides have accused the other of using increasingly aggressive and dirty tactics. The Core team says the network is congested because Classic advocates are spamming the network with low fee transactions miners cant be bothered to accept. Classic says that users who attempt to run nodes or mine blocks with their software have been hit with DDoS attacks that cripple their computer networks.