The new BitMEX research shows that it is the scalability which actually helped Bitcoin (BTC) stay decentralized. In the latest crypto news, we can see that the Bitcoin node synchronization would be almost impossible if there were not the improvements made to the software, according to the research arm of the crypto exchange BitMEX.
The team measured the Initial Block Download (IBD) times of the Bitcoin Core software releases in the period from 2012 to 2019 and saw what was needed to download the blockchain as well as verify it, then sharing their conclusions in an official blog post.
Published on November 29, the blog post by BitMEX Research shows that the older version of the Bitcoin Core software may be impossible to synchronize now – and that the scalability improvements made to the software are essential to its operation:
“Older versions of Bitcoin struggled to get past the pickup in transaction volume which occurred in the 2015 to 2016 period. Therefore we conclude that without the software enhancements, an initial synchronization today could be almost impossible.”
While this is the main conclusion the BitMEX Research shows in the Bitcoin latest news, the team also pulled versions of Bitcoin Core prior to 0.8.6 and found that these versions could not synchronize past the 2015 and 2016 period. They tried to run old software on the considerably powerful hardware but to no avail at all.
“We then even tried running Bitcoin Core 0.7.0 on our brand new local machine, with 64 GB of RAM and 8 Intel i9 processors, however, the node was still unable to get past 2016. […] The large reductions in IBD times and the inability of old nodes to fully synchronize indicate that if it were not for these scalability enhancements, by now Bitcoin would be essentially dead, even if users had the highest specification hardware available,” they noted.
The most significant improvement as the BitMEX Research shows in terms of speed took place after the Bitcoin Core version 0.12.0 when developers actually adopted a signature verification library which was built for the sole purpose of Bitcoin.
Much of the focus during the development of Bitcoin was devoted to preserving decentralization, which means keeping the hardware specifications as modest as possible.
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