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Bitcoin blockchain has a limit of 1MB of transactions in a block. This was set in 2013, when Satoshi put it in place. He didn't give much explanation for it, bu

Bitcoin blockchain has a limit of 1MB of transactions in a block. This was set in 2013, when Satoshi put it in place. He didn't give much explanation for it, but it was probably to avoid a spam attack. He said it could be raised later: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15139#msg15139 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15139#msg151... There are arguments for and against increasing the blocksize. For: - Support more transactions per second - Lower fees for users Against: - Hardfork requires all full node operators to upgrade, or they could see incorrect balances - Lower fees mean that miners make less money Also, generally, there are some philosophical differences between the sides. The big-block side usually wants bitcoin to be more like a payment network, wherease the small-block side typically views it more as digital gold and store of value.

zby 9y ago
"Lower fees mean that miners make less money" - not really. There are two mechanisms: 1. The congestion would mean bigger fees 2. In bigger blocks there will be more transactions - so more fees in the block The most probably cancel each other. Actually the big miners seem to be in favour of the Bitcoin Unlimited big blocks. What they want to stop is SegWit which is needed for scaling bitcoin off chain with Lightning etc. There is a conspiracy theory about that - and it actually makes sense to me - which is that SegWit would eliminate ASICBoost (which is an optimization technique that is implemented in some ASIC miners). But there is also another narrative that Lightning would mean banking entering the Bitcoin community - and that is why it should be stopped. Bitcoin can never become a good payment processor - this would require many orders of magnitude bigger blocks (now bitcoin can process about 7 transactions per second, VISA can process 50K transactions per second). And while storage for bigger blocks grows linearly - the other algos have probably worse complexity.
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago
> This was set in 2013 Wrong date, it was July 2010 I believe.

zby 9y ago

"Lower fees mean that miners make less money" - not really. There are two mechanisms: 1. The congestion would mean bigger fees 2. In bigger blocks there will be more transactions - so more fees in the block The most probably cancel each other. Actually the big miners seem to be in favour of the Bitcoin Unlimited big blocks. What they want to stop is SegWit which is needed for scaling bitcoin off chain with Lightning etc. There is a conspiracy theory about that - and it actually makes sense to me - which is that SegWit would eliminate ASICBoost (which is an optimization technique that is implemented in some ASIC miners). But there is also another narrative that Lightning would mean banking entering the Bitcoin community - and that is why it should be stopped. Bitcoin can never become a good payment processor - this would require many orders of magnitude bigger blocks (now bitcoin can process about 7 transactions per second, VISA can process 50K transactions per second). And while storage for bigger blocks grows linearly - the other algos have probably worse complexity.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago

> This was set in 2013 Wrong date, it was July 2010 I believe.