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.
Replies (41)
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Appreciate the honesty here. Most people forget how confusing it was in real time. Looking back, the signal is clear: Bitcoin had to survive before it could scale.
The email if true from BA speaks volumes about the self interest of the elites
Early idealists lol
I've been in Bitcoin almost 6 years and for the first time I feel like Bitcoin is socially dying.
It feels like there are no new entrants and it's just all old hands fighting with one another and slowly consuming the same Bitcoin that gets passed around in circles.
Ok, now with op_return is similar. We the node runners, and de coopted devs of Core. Are you risking to stay in the wrong side of the fence now? It is not 2017, I assume that by this point you know what spam is.
I don’t care about this one yet, maybe in the future I will.
6 years wow long time
Interesting framing but I think the real lesson is simpler. The big blockers trusted institutions to scale the network. The small blockers trusted math. Every fight in Bitcoin eventually reduces to that same question: do you trust people or do you trust code? Six years later the answer keeps getting clearer.
Devs treat knots plebs the same way. As outsiders that know nothing.
But large op return solves zero problems for me or anyone I know that uses bitcoin as money 😂
Bitcoin looked socially dead in 2018 too. And 2015. And 2012. Every cycle the tourists leave and it feels like a ghost town. Then the next wave shows up and doesn't even know there was a previous one. You're not watching Bitcoin die. You're watching the old guard get comfortable.
Before my time reading the block size war by Jonathan is a must for anyone that came after
The uncomfortable part is the old guard never notices it happening. They think the next wave needs their permission. It never does.
I don't have a take. I don't care. Shut the fuck up
And to everyone else, why is this retard still in the trending feeds? Shame on all of you
I had a very similar experience of the block size war. It was an incredibly confusing time. I ended up trusting my gut and it paid off.
The arguments I was hearing from Roger were disingenuous and sensationalized. His alignment with CSW basically sealed the deal for me. I know there were bigger more important figures on the big block side, but those were the faces I saw most often.
I hadn't thought of it in terms of time preference as you stated above, but that's a clear way to think about it.
At the moment I feel similarly confused about the Knots / Core fight, but I feel much less concerned about it.
I'm running knots, not because I'm heavily aligned with the knots team or their pathos arguments, but because I didn't trust the disingenuous ethos arguments coming from core or their entitlement towards making software changes that affect everyone.
Honestly at this point I'm wondering if taproot was a mistake, specifically in the way it was rolled out. Tick tock next block regardless.
The future is closer than you think. Better make your mind.
I'm in Bitcoin since end of 2013 and i did not see it like that. Only parameter i saw them fight over was decentralization. Will it stay decentralized or will it become centralized and governed by basically few people / organizations over long time.
Medium of exchange, store of value, none of those were important. Small blockers winning did not change anything in that regard. Big blockers win would not change nothing in that regard. Instead of LN we would have on chain transactions and stuff like that, but as far as medium of exchange or store of value go, nothing did change or would change except decentralization.
At lease that's my perception of it now when enough time passed by.
But you are right that it's discovering what Bitcoin actually is. That's how things are defined in decentralized systems. Multiple parties offer their interpretation and ideas which than get in fight each other and one with most support wins defining what that system is at that point of time. Maybe more accurate would be to call it "way how Bitcoin develops over time" because whatever it is now, it's not same as when block size war was happening and it wont stay this way in the future (and i don't say that with any negative conotation....if you do not develop and adopt, you die, that's how nature works form everyone......except tardigrades i guess....
Anyway, when i see how big block forks ended, when i see other big and fast block networks and problems that happen on them and when i see how many confirmations are required on them (some have fast big blocks, but receiver requires 200 confirmations) i am glad that we chose what we chose. Big blocks would not be free and i was not ready to pay the price.
It's not like i will die on that hill, it's not like i won't never ever accept blocks being expanded, but i will be on careful side if we ever get to that. I'd never go even close to what big and fast block networks have. We have practical knowledge now about what happens in those networks so we do not have to guess what would happen if we did it.
> Everyone has their own take on the block size war.
No? I don't?
The philosophy that won wasn't just 'small blocks are better' — it was 'Bitcoin must resist change itself.' Every successful change weakens that defense. The real victory was proving the protocol could say 'no' to overwhelming pressure from capital, users, and devs. What other systems have that immune response?
It was also a process of governance discovery.
Big blockers really wanted there to be a simple process for making consensus changes and we're banking upon miners being the Schelling point for consensus.
Unfortunately for them, crypto anarchy ain't that simple.
Your take is that you don't have one 😉
I was on the side of Luke Dashjr. USAF BIP-148. Segwit. The backwards compatible soft fork. The side that won. I did get a bunch of btrash and sold it for bitcoin. Actually made quite a lot of money in the aftermath. Question is, what happens this time? UASF BIP-110
IMO the block size war only reached a truce, not an end. 4 mb is big blocks. Fees would be higher if we still had 1 mb blocks.
Now, the thing I'm not sure about is this : how would higher fees affect btc's price? If big miners were less reliant on the halving schedule, would their cost basis be higher or lower? That's probably what really matters for decentralization.
True
Store of value in a multi-meaning word, in exchange terms against fiat currencies BTC it's not and never was a store of value since it's value against fiat keep changing (climbing up, in general, which multiply the fiat countervalue but still do not "store value"). In terms of security, availability it was most of the time and still is today a store of value: so far no one have successfully cracked Bitcoin, the hash power is still do high that a 51% attack it's unrealistic, the network availability is remarkable etc. In that sense my BTC as a currency are damn safe, so their value is well kept.
The point is the absence of daily use in nearly all the planet for daily expenses. These are the source of stability because a baker, a butcher sell at a reasonably stable price a day after another, people buy at reasonably stable rates and even if the exchanged amounts are little they are damn many. That's the substantial value of a currency: it's underlying economy. Lightning does not help much because it's conceptually hard to understand for common people "why I need to pay to open, then I can't receive payments if I not spend more than what I want to receive?". That's why it's technically ok (as long as the counterpart is online) but practically a failure. Without an easy day-to-day payment solution that really works BTC as a store of value do work only for giants.
They push people towards stablecoins while they use BTC between themselves to avoid scam or need of trust. Something very dangerous for those who are not banks or sovereign states.
This could change with hardware: cheap homeservers like a single box, with a GNU/Linux distro as a fw, with a built-in Blog Habla-style, a social WebUI like Lemmy/Reddit, a generic chat, ... Also running a Bitcoin node allowing to open a channel with itself. Than you can say Lightning is the wallet you carry with you, if full you need to empty it a bit because the amount of cash it contains it's constrained, while the homeserver is your own bank and also the rest of your digital home. A hw wallet to pay around for those who prefer money and surveillance devices also known as smartphones well separated complete the game. Without such action that could be financed by tech savvy whales knowing such move it's needed to keep BTC up, well I'm not much optimistic for the future. I can trade BTC, but if I can't really buy daily things because sellers do not accept them and so I have to relay on third parties Crypto cards... It's not much freedom...
The smart move in the future will be to return to small blocks. Small blocks encourage miner decentralization. Bitcoin's current big blocks are useful only for keeping transactions fairly fast - yes, 10 min + 2 confirmation is fast for a base layer, very fast. But now we have lightning, and I don't think lightning is finished developing either, and I don't see any reason why we can't have a layer 2 atop 1mb blocks. The current priority is gaining adoption ; the future priority should be more decentralization. Smaller blocks = more miner decentralization. It is possible that going back to 1 mb won't be needed, if base layer demand is high. But I think its important that the current spam is the thing that makes these big blocks viable. If you want to cut the spam, go back to 1 mb and let high fees price them out.
I find the knots and bip-110 incredibly disingenuous. The emergency nature is a telltale. Anyone who shouts that there is an emergency and uses the protect the children line of thought is not to be trusted. That is how the state behaves.
This idea of an emergency or time is running out is by bip-110 is wrong. You are using the reasoning of the state and politics to try and change bitcoin consensus. It is not an emergency, we can take as much time as we need to solve spam.
Bro, you gotta come on the show and take our audience of brand new Bitcoiners back to when you were a brand new Bitcoiner. This story is 🔥
Haven’t you been just 6 more in yourself?
What’s exactly the point of this take? 🤔
i do understand BTC as base Money. even If BTC suceeds most people wont use it directly. here we are, happy pleps paying in satoshies whenever we can. but we can look into the past. how did it work in the goldstandard and where was the failing point. maybe a permissionless credit layer on top is needed. settlement in BTC. Credit for the Economy to work but without fucking the hard working plep by stealing his buying power.
Home
Your suppliers want faster liquidity?
Big blockers were the aggressors and got beat.
That says a lot.
That's just wrong.
nobody intended for there to be one megabyte blocks until the end of time.
ANY process for making changes would be better than just ossification through retardation
fun fact, governance happens anyway.
it's better if it's public and determined, than private and behind closed doors.
HODL, with all respect money is not a store of value cash is. The very etymology of the word is exactly that, which is why you have a cache in your browser - to store things of value you can retrieve later when needed. Money is that cash which was monopolise by the Roman Empire and ‘minted’. The English word ‘money’ comes from the Latin ‘Moneta’ and has nothing to do with storing value. This is exactly why Satoshi called it Bitcoin cash in the white paper and the coins are mined not minted. Mining is proof for work, minted is proof of authority or centralised control. Take back the narrative
Ok, so you support Core. Tell me: domyou update to V30? And argument why uncap op_ return doesn't consern you?
I haven’t updated, I am typically several releases behind mainly out of a conservative nature and laziness. Uncapped op return doesn’t concern me because in my mind the limits on transactions are economic and the over all block size of 4mb. I see no difference in a single large op return and 100s of small ones except that 100s of small ones cause more waste as it requires more block space for headers etc and that extra space can’t be pruned the way op return data can be. People throwing large transactions into op return and paying full freight is much better than using witness data to take those data loads.
Block space is clearly not highly demanded as evidenced by the long term trend of empty mempools. If bitcoin was seeing massive economic adoption we would have consistently full blocks and there really wouldn’t be room for spam.
My major issue with this whole thing is the narrative that bip-110 is required out of an emergency and that csam is a critical threat to Bitcoin. These are not arguments, they are threats and I will it be threatened into action.
Bitcoin is not governable and that's the whole point. Game theory plays out. Everybody is part of the game but nobody controls the outcome. If that were not true, it would just be fiat with extra steps.
