Wednesday, 9 September 2020

How long until the issue of blocksize is brought up again for the Bitcoin Core community?

From the looks of it, it seems like there is eventually going to be further division in the Bitcoin Core community in the future, though that division may not be obcious right now because of the censored discussion on r/Bitcoin, and the fact that everyone at this moment is okay with full blocks and high fees. At some point, Bitcoin absolutely will have to raise its blocksize limit because on-chain fees can't be hundreds of dollars per transaction. Even with transaction batching for Lightning, it still doesn't seem viable to keep the blocksize limit so low... I've talked to other Bitcoin supporters and maximalists about increasing the blocksize, and it usually boils down to a few views/perspectives on the whole congestion situation with BTC:

  • "Increasing the blocksize (hardfork) is only acceptable if there is near 100% consensus among the community and hashpower since hardforks create a chain with new consensus rules"

  • "There is no need to increase the blocksize because almost all activity will happen off-chain with Lightning Network transactions. Institutions and banks will pay the high on-chain fees if and when they have to make high-value settlement transactions"

  • "The blocksize is already too large and should be softforked to be lower so that sync times improve, and more people can run full-nodes."

Right now the fee situation on Bitcoin is pretty bad, but it will only get worse with adoption. It already seems like the idea of achieving consensus for a hardfork is near impossible due to the nature of discussion on the Bitcointalk forum and r/Bitcoin subreddit (both owned by theymos). It directly states in the subreddit rule section that:

Promotion of client software which attempts to alter the Bitcoin protocol without overwhelming consensus is not permitted.

The issue with this is the fact that this also includes even proposing a hardfork. I've seen discussions about even putting forward a BIP that proposes bigger blocks get completely censored or deleted by r/Bitcoin mods. So the first idea that hardforks will happen later on seems extremely unrealistic.

The second idea is in direct conflict with the first one because it asserts an argument that opposes the first one. If blocksize doesn't and shouldn't be increased (and are fine the way they are), this will also cause division in the community.

The third idea is also in conflict with the first and the second, which will also likely result in division. When will this division become much more evident in the Bitcoin Core community, causing another split for Bitcoin? It's bound to happen at some point, but maybe not today.

submitted by /u/1MightBeAPenguin
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/ipa63j/how_long_until_the_issue_of_blocksize_is_brought/

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