Adding the extension blocks was not needed for Lightning, no. It was a concession to the parties who wanted bigger blocks. Ultimately it wasn’t enough, and they forked off anyway.
In retrospect, we probably should not have added that extra space, but it’s impossible to say with certainty how history would have unfolded if we hadn’t.
We could soft-fork in a reduction that cuts that back out, or makes it smaller. Or we could fork in a reduction to the main block size. It takes a hard fork to go from 1MB to 2MB, but only a soft fork to limit it to 500kb or less.
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or we could leave it the fuck alone.
This irresistable desire some people have to mess with the thing just blows my mind. My only explanation is that the kind of people who want to mess with a perfectly functional network just don't have any bitcoin in their stack and are therefore more interested in "iNnoVat1on" than they are protecting the hardest money ever created.
Bitcoin, in it's current form, solves the problem of the hard money. Messing with it in an attempt to make it do other shit, like parlor tricks, is nothing but risk and adds no significant value.
Innovation in Bitcoin is nothing more than an attack on a perfectly functional network.
If it aint broken, don't fix it. Simple wisdom but so few people actually understand it.
