Everyone has their own take on the block size war. I was there. Watching as a noob. My take has always been that this was at its core a philosophical fight.
Yes there was skullduggery and subterfuge. Yes the battlefield was over a technical parameter. Yes there was fraud and backroom dealing. All that’s true.
But what everyone was really fighting about was the chicken/egg problem that is bootstrapping a new global currency.
Gold was monetized in pre history so we have no record of how it transpired, fiat is literally decreed by governments so that doesn’t help us understand reality any better either.
Basically money has three functions. Store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account. Everyone knew that unit of account came last. The ideological divide was over which of the others came first.
Big blockers believed that medium of exchange unequivocally came first, small blockers believed store of value did and the block size became the flashpoint because it was a lever you could use to enforce your view.
I rarely talk about the block size war because I was brand new to bitcoin. It happened during my first two years and I spent most of it confused. Flipping back and forth from side to side. Thus I have a pretty good vantage point on both sides arguments and motivations.
What eventually snapped into focus for me wasn’t who was “right” on the forums, but what each side was actually optimizing for.
Big blockers were optimizing for use now. They feared ossification, irrelevance, and a future where Bitcoin was technically elegant but socially dead. If people couldn’t use it as money today, it would never get the chance to become money tomorrow.
Small blockers were optimizing for survival. They feared capture, centralization, and a future where Bitcoin worked… until it didn’t, because it had quietly turned into something that required permission, scale, and trust. If Bitcoin couldn’t be a credible store of value first, nothing else mattered.
You also have to remember at the time the small blockers were the rag tag band of outsiders, which is why it’s funny now when u hear people talk about it in conspiracy terms like a takeover of bitcoin. All of the corporate/legal/financial power was on the big block side.
From the outside it looked like a war over an esoteric technical parameter. From the inside it was a war over what Bitcoin was allowed to become.
In hindsight, the block size war wasn’t a failure of discourse or coordination. It wasn’t about one side being evil and one side being good (though I have my own thoughts on that) it was the cost of discovering what Bitcoin actually is.
And like most growing pains, it only makes sense once you’re on the other side of it.
