For a while, I've seen many BTC maximalists bring up arguments about why the block size for Bitcoin should be limited to 1 MB. I have made this post to address most of these arguments. If you disagree, feel free to make your point in the comments!
Limiting block size is what helps keep nodes cheap, and helps decentralize Bitcoin.
Let's do some math here...
With the block size of BTC being 1.00 MB, and having ~144 blocks a day, 365 days a year, there are roughly 52,560 blocks in a year. Using this data, 52.5 GB of storage will be used up in an entire year (we'll make the assumption that someone running a node buys 1 hard drive a year to store all this data).
Looking at Amazon, the average cost for 64.0 GB of storage capacity for a flash drive is roughly $10.00. This means on average, someone running a node is paying roughly 80 cents per month for storage. Okay, now let's look at the internet aspect of things. The average internet speed globally is around ~75 Mbps (which is more than enough for both BTC and BCH) and will likely run for around ~$40 a month (this is a rough figure, and slightly pessimistic, but let's take it). Therefore, doing some math:
($40.00/month + $0.80/month) x 12 months = ~$490.00/year
Okay, so it roughly costs $490.00 a year which is just a little over $1/day for running a node. Let's see how much more expensive BCH is when running the same type of node:
For BCH, everything stays the same, except for storage costs. Since the block size is 32 times bigger than BTC, doing the math, BCH will take up roughly 1.7 TB of data. For a 2 TB hard drive, the cost is roughly $60. For an entire year, that will cost about $5 per month for storage.
Taking this into consideration, we can calculate how much it will cost to run a BCH node for storage and internet:
($40.00/month + $5.00/month) x 12 months = ~$540.00/year
So in conclusion:
| BTC Node | BCH Node | |
|---|---|---|
| Price (yearly) | $490.00 | $540.00 |
| Price (monthly) | ~$40.80 | ~$45.00 |
As we can see, it really isn't that much more expensive, and this isn't even factoring in how much cheaper digital storage will become over time. As digital storage becomes bigger, we can also expand block size, and not have to worry about centralization.
The market has decided that BTC is better, therefore BCH is not Bitcoin.
While yes, based on hashing power, this is true, Bitcoin being Bitcoin is not about hashing power. It is about what Bitcoin was intended to do. Bitcoin was created by Satoshi as a form of peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Even in the whitepaper of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is not working the way it was intended to. From the whitepaper:
The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions.
It says it right here, one of the issues with current forms electronic payments is high transaction fees, and how they make small, everyday purchases expensive, making it bad for regular, everyday purchases.
Currently, looking at the fees, BTC costs roughly $0.50 for every transaction (fees vary every single block, but this is the current average), regardless of the transaction amount. That means if I'm making a purchase at a coffee shop for $2.00, it is going to cost me $2.50 effectively for the coffee. That means that I am paying 25% of my transaction value just to transfer my own money. What incentive would I have to make that purchase, especially when I could just use normal cash, and not pay ridiculously high fees for a normal transaction?
Let's compare this to BCH. Right now, the average fee for BCH is about $0.0025 for every transaction. When comparing that even to a $2 purchase, the fee is negligible and makes effectively no difference to the transaction amount. As we can see, BCH is far cheaper for everyday normal transactions, a.k.a. electronic cash.
Bitcoin only has high transaction fees because of the higher transaction volume, and Bitmain has spammed transactions to make BTC look bad.
As far as I know, I don't recall Bitmain spamming transactions on the network (I could be wrong on this). If someone has evidence of this, I will gladly retract this. As for transaction volume (number of transactions), we can use comparable numbers from when BCH and BTC were both having extremely high transaction volumes:
| Date (DD/MM/YYYY) | No. of transactions (BTC) | No. of transactions (BCH) | Average Transaction Fee (BTC) | Average Transaction Fee (BCH) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19/08/2018 | 167k | 129k | $0.65 | $0.0033 |
| 15/11/2018 | 241k | 688k | $0.74 | $0.0018 |
| 19/11/2018 | 268k | 283k | $0.79 | $0.0007 |
| 20/11/2018 | 288k | 329k | $1.11 | $0.0006 |
| 01/09/2019 | 285k | 575k | $0.68 | $0.0007 |
Note: The peak fees for both blockchains were $52.00 for BTC and $0.90 (which is still bad for BCH. The difference is that BCH has taken steps to ensure that kind of transaction fee would never happen again, even faced with the same amount of traffic on the network.)
The Lightning Network (an off-chain solution) is a better solution to Bitcoin's current problem than increasing the block size (an on-chain solution), and has a much higher transactions per second capability than BCH.
Yes, the Lightning Network may have a higher transaction per second capability when compared to BCH, but it comes at a cost: centralization.
The aim of Bitcoin was to make a peer-to-peer electronic cash system with a high transaction per second capability, but it also is supposed to have 3 distinct properties to it. Bitcoin should also be:
- Cheap (fees should be negligible, no matter how low the transaction amount)
- Decentralized
- Secure
When you take away any one of these characteristics, it becomes A LOT easier to make a currency with a higher transaction input capability, but it ignores the goal of what Bitcoin is supposed to be. For example, if you have a system of cash that is:
Cheap and secure, but not decentralized:
XRP (Ripple)
Credit Cards
Paypal
Lightning Network
Cheap and decentralized, but not secure:
LTC (Litecoin)
(DOGE) Dogecoin
Plenty of other low-use altcoins
Secure and Decentralized, but not cheap:
BTC (Bitcoin)
XMR (Monero)
BCH manages to have all 3 characteristics, all while having a transaction capability of more than 200 transactions per second. Not to mention that setting up a node on the Lightning Network is a complicated, tedious, and painful process to go through, just to put your fund somewhere where they aren't safe (you risk losing your funds pretty easily, especially if you're an everyday person who doesn't have much knowledge when it comes to technology). Not only is this the case, but eventually the funds from the Lightning Network will have to be settled on the blockchain, and when adoption increases, the fees will increase as well, meaning that you will be charged a ridiculously high amount for withdrawing your own money.
To add to this, nodes that are run by people with more resources will eventually become Lightning Hubs, meaning that they are the only few who you can go through to send a transaction to whoever you want. This makes Lightning Hubs the new intermediaries for financial transactions. Does this all sound familiar? It is literally banking right now, but with the name 'Bitcoin' slapped on top of it.
Anyway, these are all the arguments I have heard from BTC maximalists. If you have any more arguments, feel free to comment them below, and I'm willing to change my mind if you make a good point.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/g0t3c1/addressing_common_arguments_for_limiting_btcs/
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