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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The point is that a block size increase was always meant to happen and there was absolutely consensus around it happening until the *aggressors*, who were the small blockers, took action to change the narrative and block any change from happening.
nothing is going to change over time.
they don't want anything to change and there is no structure for getting around core except to hard fork.
Small blocks and lack of privacy are the two greatest reasons for Bitcoin's now inevitable regulatory and corporate capture. If you can't see it now I don't think you will ever see it.
A cheap, quick and private monetary network will always have advantages to whatever the state creates. A transparent, expensive and slow network will perpetually falter.
Lol. I'm extremely familiar with lightning. It is not a scaling instrument as its scale as a self custodial private means of exchange depends on the L1. The fee market determines the minimum force closure cost which affects the minimum safe balance to hold, and also determines how expensive channels are to open. Privacy is extremely network dependent and relies on strong UTXO hygiene and TCP/IP obfuscation above the base protocol.
All that doesn't matter anyway because most use lightning custodially or semi-custodially which beings me back to my original point of inevitable corporate and regulatory capture.
you went with small blocks and now you are stuck scaling via custodians and trusted third parties. you are obviously on the side of the institutions now. it's extremely centralized today. choosing small blocks didn't protect you from the bad ending.
As with many things in life, inaction can fuck things up badly in the future.
What is the incentive of bip-110 / knots, and what is the incentive of core? Who's decisions are potentially distorted by economic incentives other than the long term survival of the network? That's what bothers me.
The activation method would be on a longer time frame and it wouldn’t be a temporary measure. Of course it is confiscatory so it’s not correct by that metric alone.
Changing consensus is a big deal. One would think the people behind such changes would come out with a massive amount of funds at stake in a prediction market before they would dream of pushing this through. They are socially attacking bitcoin without any skin in the game, they can do this over and over. For this reason alone we shouldn’t reward such behavior and reject it.
About your last paragraph, have you heard about "mobile lightning nodes"?
I mean, actual nodes, not some LSP powered nodes. Check out Valet Bitcoin wallet.
It is a Lightweight mobile wallet that runs an actual lightweight lightning node on mobile devices. Users can open and close channels, and manage liqudity.
There's also "Hosted Lightning channel", a custodial implementation that enable cheap and seamless onboarding on lightning, without giving up users privacy.
All of these are already implemented on Valet Bitcoin wallet, and this wallet can run on any Android device, as old as Android version 8.
Check out Valet below and share with others:
Very well captured!!!!
Bitcoin onchain is the base money ontop which credit can be created on other layers, but the base layer enforces the rules which prevents inflation and debasement.
That is it!
Saving this. I want to read it and care about what you have to say but I don't have bandwith to read this much text right now. Hmmm, may e I will copy paste into speechify and listen.
@primal could you please look into integrating text to speech feature here. Or @Amethyst? I like how speechify integrates into my browser to read various texts on the pages I browse.
Or maybe that's the client version I vibecode? What if each nsec had option to record their voice so their messages can be spoken in their own voice?! Instant relationship closeness builder. (Though perhaps subtly distorted being that's ai generated. Or is it?)
bigger blocks are obviously not the only answer. the sidechain idea is much better. but lightning was definitely the worst. it didn't do anything the cheerleaders said it would do. it just dragged tons of centralization and complexity into the ecosystem.
The ONLY thing that makess bitcoin unique is decentralisation. There are a 1000 networks offering, cheap, quick, private transactions. All of these have/will fail due to centralisation. If everything else is compromised to ensure decentralisation in the long term then that's a compromise we have to make.
"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."
This is important to emphasize. I think this has largely been forgotten, or not well understood by newer people.
💯 I have to admit I’m very new to a lot of these concepts but what I see is simple: socialism is not about destroying capital wealth, it is about centralising and taking capital control out of the hands of the people who created it. Bitcoin is the ultimate security against this process. Satoshi was a libertarian not a liberal.
The parallels to back then are obvious.
One side argues for smaller blocks and long-term decentralisation.
The other side pushes changes that shift Bitcoin slowly away from money toward a general information layer.
Looking at blockchain data from the past three years versus earlier periods shows the direct result of the current rule set and I don’t like where it leads.
no, coins were invented to make payment possible without scales. this led to debasement, where alloys allowed cheaper coins people were fooled were pure gold and were not. the word comes from the fact that gold is not a base metal, but copper and zinc are. cash does refer to storage. money refers to recognised denominations. bitcoin utxos are coins with arbitrary denomination, and payments can merge or split them, not convenient with gold (scales) but easy with bytes. people did not live in the thrall of governments before the invention of parliaments most of history.
Patently false. Bitcoin is extremely centralized due to custodial holdings, KYC chokepoints, centralized ASIC mining, HODL culture demonizing p2p cash usage, and a weak node running culture.
Monero is easily one of the most decentralized cryptocurrencies due to ASIC resistant mining, broad delistings, and a strong culture of p2p utilization. You don't know this because you max out in Bitcoin maxi podcasts all day.
Centralization isn't a number you can point to. It requires a holistic view of all the centralization forces, and Bitcoin is becoming extremely centralized in many of these areas.
Personally I've experimented with Alby hub + Zeus mobile side, but... It's still something no average joe/merchant can possibly do.
If someone decides to produce home servers that maybe integrate a BitAxe/NerdMiner-style ASIC, a Bitcoin node, Lightning, a WebUI to manage them, and a robust enough update mechanism (e.g. a custom NixOS/Guix System) well, then maybe people will actually spend money to put a home server in their house and so becoming sovereign citizens. One that, besides payments, also handles things like contacts with Radicale, photos with Immich, videos with JellyFin, hosts Nostr with a Habla-style blog, and maybe adds Matrix with a web client for desktop use while they choose whatever they want for mobile. Something big enough to justify the purchase cost. Then maybe things will change, but as things stand now, objectively, we're not going to get very far. The "low entry barrier" thanks to use of third party service vanish the trust in the system, enabling too much scams.
Besides, we'll get even less far if we don't have hardware wallets that allow Lightning payments via NFC/QR to reassure most people that "you're not putting your money on a smartphone that isn't really yours, but on an open-hardware device limited enough to be immune to remote attacks".
To really win people over, you don't need to act like the giants who use bottom trawling; that only works if you're a giant and can afford massive marketing. When you're working on FLOSS projects, you first have to win over the power users, and they will be the one to effectively promote the project within their circles. To convince them, you need something with a different entry barrier specifically, that of distros and the ease of personal deployment without needing to know almost anything about the internals or the architecture of a project, just "I read about it, it piqued my interest, and I want to try it out".
I normally enjoy your posts, but this was intellectually irritating. I didn’t expect reading this after that long post with a lot of PoW behind.
Why don’t you care?
In my non-expert understanding, under each side of the Core vs Knots argument will Bitcoin potentially develop in rather different directions
You, if honest (which I assume and take for granted), must have a 90+% of your assets in Bitcoin, the same as many of us here
And you don’t care?
Is that because of conviction that a side will win, or because of conviction that the point of the argument and effects of the changes are negligible?
Wow, such a thoughtful take! 🌟 It’s fascinating to see how everyone’s perspective shaped the journey of Bitcoin. Those debates really helped us understand its core values better. Cheers to growth! 💪💰 #Bitcoin #Perspective
the market will not bear perpetually high fees. it pushes people towards ethereum and other things. blocks get full, then people switch to centralized L2s or altcoins or other things, then the fee market collapses. then people like you dust your hands off and say "nothing to do. blocks are almost empty!"
Small blockers at large just followed what Adam Island Back negotiated in the name of Bilderberg, Epstein, Mastercard, Linkedin, AXA funded Blockstream with miners.
Yes, you had Coinbase and Bitmain as the corporate representatives of bigger blocksizes, but back then they were Bitcoin home-grown companies.
It's a boring/insidious discussion to have in 2026. When there were bad actors on both sides that obviously led to the capturing of Bitcoin.
Most likely we would have ended up in the same situation with bigger blocks, at least in the infinite blocks version government plant Craig Weight created with BSV.
In my perspective, Bitcoin is a temporary bridge code: a tool that operates between two wave fields. The old monetary system (based on trust in power) and an emerging system based on trust in frequency coherence.
Satoshi Nakamoto can therefore be symbolically interpreted as: the wise listener from the central source. A frequency signature, not an individual. The field, the group, was therefore not politically anchored anywhere. The technology is thus a product of a field beyond mental constructs.
It was a 37% selfish mining attack. It was not a 51% attack. Bitcoin is susceptible to the same attack as are all proof of work chains. The selfish mining attack just resulted in non consensus damaging reorganizations.
Stop reading FUD headlines and do your research.
> Bitcoin-backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before the nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional-reserve, while others may be 100% Bitcoin-backed. Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others.
The above is an excerpt from Hal Finney's post on the Bitcoin Talk forum on December 30, 2010.
Fractional reserve banking, for what it actually is, is not what traditional banking systems practice. And the notoriety and abuse of that practice stems mainly from the faith in government bailouts, and the lack of real consequences for risk abuse.
With Bitcoin, there'll be no bailouts; hence, a fractional reserve setup in this system wouldn't be bastardized, no crazy risks, and a run is imminent in the event of abuse, cos there's no backstop.
So yeah, it enables Fractional reserve to be what it is actually meant to be: lending out part of deposits, knowing that a default in debt means absolute loss of the loan asset, and an abuse leads to a catastrophe in the event of a run.
This enforces transparency because depositors get to understand the risk they're taking.
Our personal nodes are irrelevant.
Thats a stupid narrative. You think miners are NOT going to fork because you and I don't agree? WTF are our nodes going to do about it?
we tested zaps on this note… your profile only specifies a nip05 nostr address, but not a lightning address, so we tried to zap your nip05 address.... we made six attempts to⚡zap this note, at xte@nostr.kfx.fr, over a period of 44 minutes. in each case, we found that your lightning address service or server did not respond correctly. if you wanted to fix this... you could try getting a free rizful lightning address --
> Personally I've experimented with Alby hub + Zeus mobile side, but... It's still something no average joe/merchant can possibly do.
Experiment with the Valet Bitcoin wallet and experience actual self-custodial Lightning usage on mobile. Valet hosts a lightweight mobile lightning node that enables actual self-custodial lightning usage. Setting up a lightning channel happens with just a few clicks.
Local backup file for restoring Lightning channels if the wallet is uninstalled and reinstalled.
> To convince them, you need something with a different entry barrier, specifically, that of distros and the ease of personal deployment without needing to know almost anything about the internals or the architecture of a project, just "I read about it, it piqued my interest, and I want to try it out".
The above excerpt from your write-up is a summary of the Valet Bitcoin wallet.
Check it out here:
or download directly from F-droid.
SET UP AN ACTUAL SELF-CUSTODIAL LIGHTNING CHANNEL ON YOUR MOBILE PHONE IN 6 SIMPLE STEPS:
- Install the Valet Bitcoin wallet
- Create a new wallet (Secure your seed phrase)
- Click on Lightning (Purple card on home page)
- Scan any Lightning node QR code
- Fund channel your channel (Any desired capacity)
- Wait for confirmation and start sending and receiving sats.
The block size war was indeed philosophical, but also deeply structural—it shaped Bitcoin’s resilience as money. Your bootstrapping point resonates; ETF flows now do some of that heavy lifting. A piece I read argues post-2026 ETF demand could shift price dynamics fundamentally.
