Bitcoin’s limitations

For a cryptocurrency, bitcoin faces serious design limitations which could prove fatal.

1. Each block is limited a one megabyte, each transaction is at least 250 bytes limiting each block with a limit of 4000 transactions which makes it approximately 7 transaction per second. This is slow compared to Visa (2000/sec)
2. Nodes which miss out on hard forking of new features will be considered invalid. Updating the software for all nodes will be extremely difficult.

Yet the 2016 bitcoin road map promises some changes:

• Implement BIP 109: Raise block size limit from 1MB to 2MB.
• Hard fork with 75% activation threshold (750 of 1000 blocks), 28 day activation grace period.

This might just be what’s needed to revive bitcoin.

Sources:

Princeton — Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies

https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/documentation/blob/master/roadmap/roadmap2016.md