Bigger Blocks and Smarter Contracts: What's In Bitcoin Cash's Next Fork?

Bitcoin cash's next software upgrade may be even more ambitious than its first - and that's no small feat given last time it broke off from bitcoin in acrimonious fashion.

Perhaps most notably, the change will quadruple bitcoin cash's block size parameter from 8 MB to 32 MB, allowing for vastly more transactions per block.

Last fall, bitcoin cash's developers chose to ignore the protests of bitcoin's more seasoned developers, who had long argued that increasing the block size and moving the cryptocurrency forward too fast could jeopardize the more than $157 billion network.

It's an easy change, but one that bitcoin cash developers say could have positive consequences, as the OP RETURN function has been traditionally used by services that require time-stamping, asset creation, rights management and other use cases that expand the capabilities of blockchains.

Not only did bitcoin cash developers pack in features, but they've also added back some of the old capabilities that bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto stripped from the protocol early on.

"Essentially out of an abundance of caution and lack of time to fully explore and fix the edge cases that needed to be addressed, the decision was taken to simply disable any opcodes around which there were doubts or even hints of doubts," said nChain developer Steve Shadders, in a blog post describing the features in bitcoin cash's hard fork.

It's notable that bitcoin cash is rolling these out now since bitcoin contributor Johnson Lau proposed re-adding these same smart contracts to bitcoin in February, a context that adds a bit of competition to the mix.

All software implementations of bitcoin cash, including bitcoinABC, bitcoin unlimited and bitcoin classic, have agreed to upgrade.

If those proposals don't make it to the protocol relatively quickly, bitcoin cash developers don't plan on waiting - putting the opcode up for consideration on the cryptocurrency's next hard fork, slated for October.

Some bitcoin cash users wonder whether the block size parameter needs to be much bigger to make room for an onslaught of data-heavy bitcoin cash projects, such as Memo, a recently launched censorship-resistant social network.