Bitcoin Unlimited chief scientist, Peter Rizun, revealed that the Gigablock project, which he leads, managed to mine a massive block of 1GB size on a testnet.
Gigablock is a joint research effort of the University of British Columbia, nChain and BitcoinUnlimited devs (see BUIP065) to test just how large blocks can Bitcoin support. An ambitious goal of the project is to build and demonstrate a bitcoin network that will be able to carry VISA-level traffic, i.e. over 3000 transactions per second (TPS or tx/sec).
To do that, Gigablock uses a testing bitcoin network (testnet) where researchers experiment with large block sizes to measure and improve blockchain transaction congestion.
Rizun said that he would present the experiment where a 1GB block was mined and propagated at the Scaling Bitcoin conference.
Along with the huge block mined, Rizun and Andrew Stone revealed on a Reddit forum some of Gigablock's initial findings.
According to them, they reached a sustained 300 transactions per second. And they appear confident speeds of 1000 TPS are feasible. After all, the most significant bottleneck was mempool admission speed. But that is not the case anymore, they stressed, as they managed to achieve mempool admission speeds of 10.000 tx/sec.
Note that the Gigablock project has been informally endorsed by Bitmain's Jihan Wu, who is on the pro-"Big Blockers" side of the everlasting scaling debate inside Bitcoin.
Gigablock testnet: BUIP 065: Gigablock Testnet Initiative https://t.co/dRaDyFF87U
— Jihan Wu (@JihanWu) September 3, 2017