Two attempts to increase Bitcoin's block size limit via hard forks — Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Classic — have failed to gain much support in terms of network hashrate, but early bitcoin advocate and angel investor Roger Ver is not giving up on the cause. Ver is currently testing a new mining pool at Bitcoin.com, and he's put together a new development team to work on an alternative to Bitcoin Core, the reference implementation of the Bitcoin protocol.

Bitcoin Magazine recently reached out to Ver to get more details on his plan to increase the block size limit by way of a hard fork.

A Work-in-Progress

According to Ver, his plan for hard forking Bitcoin is still a work-in-progress. "I still have lots more research and thinking to do," he told Bitcoin Magazine. "The first step is to actually have our pool up and running. I think you will see our first block mined on the network this coming week."

The Bitcoin.com mining pool mined its first block a few days after Bitcoin Magazine reached out to Ver.

The current mining pool software is running Bitcoin Unlimited, but Ver says a specific plan for increasing the Bitcoin block size has not been chosen at this time. With Bitcoin Unlimited, nodes are able to choose the maximum size of the blocks they create and accept as valid. According to one Bitcoin.com mining pool developer, the pool will mine 1 megabyte blocks and accept blocks as large as 16 megabytes for now.

When  asked about an activation threshold for a hard fork, Ver seemed to distance himself from the idea of increasing the block size limit without a large amount of support signaled by miners on the network. "Ultimately the threshold is always 51 percent, but we would also likely support something higher in order to try to maintain more cohesiveness with the community," he said.

Ver is unable to publicly disclose the members of his alternative Bitcoin development team at this time, although he recently stated during an episode of The Bitcoin Game that former Bitcoin Core lead maintainer Gavin Andresen is not on the team.

In terms of how much hashing power the pool will have on mainnet, Ver told Bitcoin Magazine, "We will start off with a very small amount on mainnet to test for a few blocks, and then grow quickly from there."

Bitcoin Unlimited Forks Classic Off Testnet

Although the Bitcoin.com mining pool only recently went live on the mainnet, the pool has been operating on testnet for over a month. In fact, the Bitcoin.com mining pool forked Bitcoin Classic off of the testnet because Bitcoin Unlimited signals support for BIP 109 without actually implementing the full set of rules in that specific proposal.

"I would recommend reading the discussions that already took place on /r/btc about this," said Ver when asked about this incident.

When Bitcoin Core contributor and Blockstream CTO Greg Maxwell challenged Ver regarding the testnet fork and the "consensus inconsistencies between Bitcoin 'Classic' and other implementations are now causing Classic to reject the testnet chain with most work," Ver pointed out, "We are testing on testnet. That's what testnet is for."

Bitcoin Unlimited has been promoted as production-ready software for at least half a year, which is one of the reasons why some Bitcoin Core contributors have been seeking further clarification on exactly what was being tested with Ver's testnet mining pool.