This week continues the contentious Bitcoin block size debate and discussions of the emergence of the Bitcoin XT client, see below, and more talk about numerous BIPs (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) presented by varied Bitcoin developers and community luminaries.

As back to school continues, various academic institutions are beginning to offer courses in Bitcoin from New York University, Stanford University, Duke University, MIT, and there will now be a Coursera course from Princeton University. See below for further details.

Finally, following video game news, CEO of the currently crowdfunding Spells of Genesis tradable card game (TCG) that uses the Bitcoin blockchain to secure in game assets spoke about virtual assets and digital currencies with Bitcoin luminary and entrepreneur Erik Voorhees.

Lots to go over in this week’s Bitcoin Weekly, so buckle up and tune in.

Bitcoin block size fork debate continues to blaze

The Bitcoin network currently supports 1 MB blocks when miners pack together transactions for inclusion in the Bitcoin blockchain. The consensus in the community is that this is unsustainable as the network begins to pick up adoption and speed due to that this limits the number of transactions that can be processed per second. It has been suggested that increasing the block size will be effective in providing further scalability to the Bitcoin network and protocol.

However, the road ahead as to how to get that expansion in block size is contentious.

Different Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) have been presented by a lot of smart people. All of them address the Bitcoin block size problem in different ways and are currently being debated. photo credit: Bitcoin IMG_1924 via photopin (license)

Numerous solutions named BIP 100, BIP 101, BIP 102, BIP ???, and others—BIP stands for “Bitcoin Improvement Proposal.” Another proposed solution has been Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn’s Bitcoin XT client, which supports bigger blocks, but also poses the possibility of a hard fork for the Bitcoin protocol and network, as covered previously by SiliconANGLE in the Bitcoin Weekly.

The Bitcoin XT client was proposed as a way to resolve the block size crisis, but it does so in a fashion that has caused a split in the community. A fact sized upon by a lot of external media (especially last week, see link above) and has fueled a great deal of debate.

Although censored in the past the Bitcoin subreddit on Reddit has begun hosting daily dialogs on the nature of the block size debate, which sometimes includes talk of Bitcoin XT. These dialogs are being published daily, which breaks up the discussion a lot more than is easy to follow, but here are the current links: August 22, 2015; August 23, 2015; August 24, 2015; August 25, 2015; and August 26, 2015.

The BIP 101 standard has seen a great deal of support recently with eight major companies signing a document showing support for implementing the standard into Bitcoin Core. Signatories include Stephen Pair, CEO of Bitpay; Peter Smith, CEO of Blockchain.info; Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle.com; Sean Neville, President of Circle.com; Sam Cole, CEO of KNCminer.com; Charles Cascarilla, CEO of itBit.com; John McDonnell, CEO of Bitnet.io; Wences Casares, CEO of Xapo.com; and Mike Belshe, CEO of Bitgo.com. This list includes several Bitcoin wallets—Blockchain.info, Circle, BitGo, and Xapo—as well as financial services—BitPay and Bitnet–and Bitcoin exchange itBit, as well as mining outfit KnCMiner.

The BIP 101 proposal was drafted by Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, and would replace the 1 MB cap on Bitcoin block size with a maximum size that grows at a predicable rate over time—by doubling approximately every two years until it reaches 8 MB.

The above video gives a fairly decent, although not too detailed, rundown of what the Bitcoin blockchain debate is all about and how it is affecting the community. It was published by the CATO Institute features Jim Harper, a senior fellow at the institute with knowledge in technology and law.

Bitcoin reaches into the classroom this Fall

As the fall season swift approaches, classes will be back in session once again and students will be looking toward the future. As a result, it’s a good time to look into what schools are offering Bitcoin-related classes.

According to an article in Bitcoinist, Stanford University has entered into an agreement with New York University and Duke University to provide a Bitcoin course. Stanford’s proposed course is CS251 – Crypto Currencies: Bitcoin and Friends—the class syllabus will include topics on altcoins, Bitcoin transactions, consensus protocols, cryptocurrency, elliptic curve cryptography, hash functions, mining strategies and incentives, proposed Bitcoin regulation, and Zerocoin.

photo credit: Night Owl City via photopin cc

New York University (NYU) and Duke University began offering Bitcoin classes during the 2014 Fall semester. Markedly Fred Ehrsam, Coinbase, Inc. co-founder, graduated from Duke in 2010.

For those who don’t have access to one of these expensive schools, Princeton University has started a course at Coursera, an open massive online classroom project, called Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies. The first session of this class starts on September 4, 2015 and lasts until October 31st. Future sessions are still being planned.

Just this August, the MIT Media Lab also announced a new Bitcoin class. The vision of the class is to inspire the “next generation” of Bitcoin talent. As there is already a strong Bitcoin presence at MIT between the lab and its Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) which launched in April with statements by Brian Forde, MIT Media Lab director of digital currency, and Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab.

“Our course will provide students with a broad perspective on what’s going on,” said David Shrier, a lecturer at the Media Lab to CoinDesk, “where success and failure has struck, and what the future looks like from various angles.”

CEO of EverdreamSoft Shaban Shaame and Erik Voorhees talk digital assets

Spells of Genesis is an in-development video game that uses the Bitcoin blockchain (via Counterparty) make virtual cards actually tradable cards for a fully virtual tradable card game. This capability has huge implications for multiplayer games that use virtual assets—not just computer trading card games—and it has already been pioneered by the digital currency aspect of bitcoins.

Shaban Shaame, CEO of EverdreamSoft SA developer of Spells of Genesis, went on The Tatiana Show hosted by Tatiana Moroz to talk about how SoG’s approach to virtual items secured by the blockchain change the way that players approach the ownership of their own cards (or other game assets.) He was joined by Erik Voorhees, co-founder of the Bitcoin company Coinapult (Rolling Hills International Inc.) and founder of Shapeshift Ag.

See past coverage of Spells of Genesis on SiliconANGLE for more information about the game engine and the trading card aspects.

Each card in Spells of Genesis has a component that exists as a Counterparty asset and is secured by the Bitcoin blockchain. This means that every card in SoG is tradable in the same way bitcoins are, which leads to users being able to trade virtual cards as if they are actual commodities.

“Not only do you own [the card] in the game, but you possess it as a real item. And as a real item you can send it to other people and trade with them real easily,” said Voorhees. “I think this will be the genesis of a whole world of digital assets that become real things that people buy and sell and have: digital commodities.”

Voorhees argued further that having assets secured by the blockchain permits the developer also to prove the scarcity of particular items—thus providing for the value of that item. And those assets could be used by 3rd parties in other games or products irrespective of how it was used in the original product. Examples might be a card in SoG might unlock content in a different game from a different developer as a player can prove that they own that card by signing a message with its private key.

Voorhees sees this production of digital assets continuing to build and that other games might take advantage of the benefits of providing blockchain-based assets.

Artwork from Spells of Genesis, “Blockchain”, copyright EverdreamSoft

Shaame believes that it is still early for any companies to already use the blockchain. He does not know any other company, RPG, MMO, multiplayer, etc. who have experimented yet. However, he thinks that the benefits of transferable currency and assets has a lot of potential in gaming, especially in the long term for developing gaming platforms that can interchange game assets and currencies.

It may be years before the first World of Warcraft where a player can share their orc’s Sword of a Thousand-Truths with their space marine in Universe of Starcraft, but it’s certainly a possible outcome.

Featured image credit: via reddit member huevos_de_acero