Reflection on the Bitcoin Block Size War

Recently, I read two historical books that document the Bitcoin block size war of the 2010s: Jonathan Bier's "The Blocksize War" and Roger Ver and Steve Patterson's "Hijacking Bitcoin." These two books represent the views of the small block faction and the large block faction, respectively.

It is interesting to read historical books about events that I have personally experienced and participated in. Although I am familiar with most of the events and both sides' narratives, I still discovered some unknown or forgotten details. At that time, I supported the big block faction, although I was a pragmatic moderate block advocate, opposing extreme growth or absolutist claims.

Views of the Small Block Faction

The small block faction believes that Bitcoin should not increase the block size limit through hard forks, as this would make running and validating nodes more difficult and expensive. They are more concerned with protocol-level decision issues, believing that protocol changes should be very rare and require a high level of consensus among users.

The small block faction believes that Bitcoin should become a new type of currency that is not controlled by central organizations and central banks. They worry that frequent governance activities could undermine Bitcoin's unique advantages.

The views of the Big Block faction

The big block faction believes that Bitcoin should be digital cash rather than digital gold. They cite Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper and forum posts to support their view, arguing that the shift from digital cash to digital gold was imposed by a small group of core developers.

The big block faction criticizes second-layer solutions such as the Lightning Network for their shortcomings in practice, believing that even with these solutions, increasing the block size will ultimately still be necessary. They are concerned that this complexity will drive users to use Bitcoin in a centralized manner.

Key Divergence

Both parties have a basic consensus on the description of the specific debate, but their perspectives on deeper issues are completely different:

• The small block faction believes it represents users and opposes a few powerful miners and exchange groups.
• The Big Block faction believes it represents the users and opposes a small number of self-appointed high-ranking clergy and venture capital-backed companies.

Both factions claim to uphold the decentralization of Bitcoin, but their methods differ.

My Point of View

At that time, I supported the big block faction, mainly based on the following points:

1. The original intention of Bitcoin was digital cash, but high transaction fees may stifle this use case.
2. The statement by the small block faction regarding "user consensus" lacks a clear definition.
3. Segregated Witness increases block size compared to a simple hard fork is too complex.
4. The small block party conducted improper censorship on social media.

At the same time, I am also disappointed with some practices of the big block faction, such as the refusal to establish any realistic principles for block size limits.

I proposed a balanced approach to determine the Block size limit: achieving a balance between increasing the cost of writing to the chain and reading from the chain. Ideally, if the demand increases by 100 times, we should increase the Block size by 10 times and the fees by 10 times.

Unilateral Capability Trap

By reading these two books, I saw a political tragedy: one side monopolizes all capable individuals but promotes narrow views; the other side correctly identifies the issues but fails to cultivate execution abilities. This situation is common in various political environments.

The big block faction seems to be unaware of the need to have the capability in execution, and ultimately paid the price for it. I refer to this issue as the unilateral capability trap, which is a fundamental problem faced by anyone attempting to establish democratic or diversified entities.

The Importance of Technological Innovation

Unfortunately, neither of these two books mentions new technologies like ZK-SNARKs at all. The ultimate way to alleviate political tensions is not compromise, but new technologies. Ethereum has some successful examples in this regard.

When the ecosystem stops embracing new technologies, it inevitably stagnates and becomes more contentious. This is why I feel uneasy about the perspective of degrowth and "technology cannot solve social issues."

A key question for the future of Bitcoin is whether it can become a technologically forward-looking ecosystem. Recent developments such as Inscriptions and BitVM have brought hope for this.

Summary

Analyzing the successes and failures of Bitcoin is valuable for understanding broader issues of digital community governance. Ethereum has learned a lot from this, such as the importance of client diversity. The network state movement can also take lessons from this to avoid the fate of repeated fragmentation.

I recommend reading these two books to understand this pivotal moment in the history of Bitcoin. This is not only about Bitcoin, but it also provides important lessons for the other digital nations we will be building in the coming decades.