Bitcoin is so awesome that it's the second most important currency after bitcoin itself — a fact that also makes it a valuable asset. As we all know, bitcoin has a huge untapped market potential, though it hasn't been tested extensively yet. The biggest obstacle to its rapid growth is the Bitcoin block reward. The current block reward at 21 million BTC is currently 25MB/SHA256, as bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto had promised. The current reward is set to rise again to 51% by the month of August. But the new block size cap means that at certain point, bitcoin will become completely unusable.
The main Bitcoin scaling solutions: scaling in hard and soft forks
As discussed above, the Bitcoin consensus algorithm has evolved over time depending on which protocol is activated. One change that allows users to switch hard forks is that the current hard fork requires the approval of an overwhelming majority of miners to activate this new version. The idea behind this rule is to let users decide between competing version of Bitcoin, as the protocol is not meant to be used by only an elite few. But this does not always work and the network split over hard forks in 2014 and 2016 has led to Bitcoin reverting back to the Bitcoin that existed on 2014 October 1. The problem is that, at least for now, the number of active miners is very small, as a majority of mining capacity is already engaged.
Litecoin is better than bitcoin in the long term, even for consumers and small businesses. It's great that more people are starting businesses like bitcoin ATM's and micro-transaction trading, which will allow people the freedom of choice by being able to purchase bitcoin directly and receive their rewards in any digital form.
A lot of the work of developing software in OpenStack for IoT is done by developers inside the OpenStack community. Our latest development work is focused on building the OpenStack AppServer backend for smart contract platforms such as Ethereum that will make it more useful for our users. We are also excited to provide the same service to our micro-transaction vendors. The fact that so many vendors are now building smart contracts for OpenStack is testament to our commitment to the development of OpenStack for IoT.
We are also focused on building the community by releasing the version of OpenStack that runs on our latest server cluster in our OpenStack Lab cloud, which makes it easier to upgrade in the future and to build smart contracts.
On the security side of things, our team always takes security very seriously. We maintain detailed, comprehensive security policies, a bug bounty program, automated patching and a security audit process that continually works with all of the major security researchers.