To this day, block size is one of the most discussed topics among blockchain developers. How much content can be stored in a block involves the hardware requirements of the nodes, which in turn affects the decentralization of the entire chain. Different views on this issue have also led to different consensus designs, and of course, many forks that we are familiar with. Looking back on the short history of cryptocurrency, the beginning of all this may be counted from eight years ago today.
On August 15, 2015, two early Bitcoin technology pioneers, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, jointly announced in a blog that their new version of BitcoinXT would implement the BIP-101 proposal, which would be activated directly without the need for a miner vote. This day was later called the "block size war outbreak day."
Blockchain at a crossroads
Since the birth of Bitcoin in 2009, the Bitcoin community has been divided on some key issues. Among them, the debate around the size of Bitcoin blocks has been the most intense. This controversy originated from the original design of Bitcoin. In order to prevent meaningless transactions and data expansion, the mysterious founder Satoshi Nakamoto set a limit of 1 megabyte per block size. But as Bitcoin became more popular, this upper limit began to appear stretched, leading to network transaction congestion and increased confirmation time. In fact, as early as 2013, core developer Jeff Garzik proposed doubling the block size to 2 megabytes, which triggered initial discussions on the block size in the Bitcoin community.
In 2015, the controversy escalated further when developers who supported block enlargement launched the Bitcoin XT project, attempting to directly increase the block size to 8 megabytes.
On the one hand, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, two original developers who had in-depth exchanges with Satoshi Nakamoto, prefer to increase the block size to 8 megabytes as a strategy to cope with the growth of transaction volume. On the other hand, core developers such as Greg Maxell, Luke-Jr and Pieter Wuille warn that excessive expansion may result in fewer nodes being able to run full nodes, reducing the decentralization of Bitcoin. It is even proposed that hard forks may lead to a chaotic split of the network, and the unlimited pursuit of expanding blocks is not the best solution for scalability.
At the same time, 2015 also saw the birth of Ethereum. Its founder, Vitalik Butarin, although a staunch supporter of large blocks, his idea fell on the Ethereum chain. He believed that the scalability of the chain should be boundless, and all smart contracts and data should be included in the chain, while providing larger blocks and lower transaction fees.
The dispute subsequently evolved into a serious split in the Bitcoin community. The two sides held several rounds of heated discussions on the block size, but could not reach a consensus. The block size war was initially just a debate about how the network could scale to handle the increase in transaction volume, but later evolved into a philosophical debate about the ultimate purpose of Bitcoin and a "political drama" about how to manage this open source project.
In 2017, developers who supported large blocks initiated a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash, which directly increased the block size to 8 megabytes. This led to the official split of the Bitcoin community into two camps. Those who supported small blocks continued to maintain the original Bitcoin blockchain, while those who supported large blocks created a new Bitcoin Cash blockchain. So far, the Bitcoin block size dispute has led to the first and largest fork in the history of the blockchain.
After the fork, the two chains developed separately, and the block size dispute continued. Bitcoin maintained the block size of 1 megabyte, while Bitcoin Cash further increased the block size to 32 megabytes in 2018. In the end, the small block size war was won. But winning a war does not mean that the war is over forever, because new BIPs are still being proposed, and there are still many debates between the "small block camp" and the "large block camp".
Brc 20, Ordinals: A new front in the power struggle
The Bitcoin Taproot upgrade inadvertently opened up a new design space that allows users to engrave arbitrary content on the blockchain. In 2023, the Bitcoin ecosystem gained some unexpected gameplay, brc 20, ordinarys, and Bitcoin NFT. With the emergence of these gameplays, new disputes have emerged and intensified, but these are called another form of block size war by many people.
First, due to the emergence of these games, gas fees have soared. From the perspective of miners, this is undoubtedly a good thing, because from the summer of 2021 to the beginning of 2023, the Bitcoin block space is almost a wasteland, and the income of miners is very small. But it is not a good thing for some people who can't afford the high gas fees. "I am mainly employed in Africa. They don't have the privilege like you to pay these high fees. They really need BTC, and you guys are just playing." Bitcoin educator and Anita Posch wrote on Twitter.
More importantly, BRC 20 and Bitcoin NFT have challenged the original 1M limit block size. The most notable example is that Udi Wertheimer, the founder of Meme NFT Taproot Wizards, planned the largest block and transaction in Bitcoin history, with a block size of nearly 4 MB, known as "the largest Bitcoin area in history." Block" has also been accused by many people of being an attack on Bitcoin.
Blockstream CEO Adam Back, Bitcoin Core developer LukeDashjr and others believe that this will cause the size of the Bitcoin blockchain to expand rapidly, and the equipment requirements for running full nodes will be greatly increased, resulting in a reduction in full nodes across the entire network and a decrease in censorship resistance. At the same time, unexpectedly large transactions and large blocks will impact ecological facilities such as wallets, mining pools, and browsers, causing some facilities to become abnormal, such as some transactions failing to be parsed normally. In addition, in order to reduce the time to synchronize and verify huge transactions and blocks, mining pools or miners may choose not to download and generate blocks without verifying the transactions and blocks, which brings security risks.
They even severely criticized Taproot Wizard for this behavior, saying: "This is an attack on Bitcoin. Bitcoin blocks have a 1M limit. Taproot Wizard's 4M data is placed in the witness and uploaded to the chain. Blocks and transactions bypass the 1M limit. 4M is OK, and 400M is OK! In this sense, this is not innovation, but an attack on a vulnerability!"
Udi responded by saying that he himself owns a lot of BTC and is doing this to make it stronger. Like anything that resists stress, what doesn’t kill it makes it stronger. He wants to prove a point: the vitality around Bitcoin has stagnated, and he wants to change that, knowing full well that if people like him are truly a threat to Bitcoin, then Bitcoin should fail.
Let’s take a look at BRC 20. Although the popularity of BRC 20 has declined recently compared to a few months ago, it still has a considerable influence. Since April 23, 2023 (when BRC 20 started trading), Bitcoin’s UTXO set has expanded from 5 GB to 6.8 GB.
Bitcoin enthusiast Ajian (@AurtrianAjian) believes that this design of BRC 20 has a significant impact on the security, economy (scalability) and decentralization of the protocol. First of all, because it is not attached to UTXO, it naturally cannot rely on the UTXO's own anti-duplicate spending mechanism. BRC 20 is based on the "first come, first served" principle based on block transaction ordering. Without this "first come, first served" as the ultimate backing, it cannot prevent negative balances as a form of duplicate spending.
But there are also many voices of supporters. Nic Carter, co-founder of investment firm Castle Island Ventures, once talked about how some Bitcoin supporters today refuse to use the network for new assets like Ordinal NFT and BRC-20, which is wrong. Considering the crypto-libertarian foundation of the Bitcoin movement, which can be traced back to economic philosopher Murray Rothbard and the cypherpunk culture of the 1990s, it is unreasonable to ask for a review of these non-economic use cases.
The Balance of Power: Who Decides Bitcoin’s Future?
Behind these debates, there are not only disagreements about technology, but also deeper disagreements about the purpose of Bitcoin and the philosophy behind it. Governing decentralized open source projects remains a challenge. What determines the future of Bitcoin? Developers? Miners? Nodes? Community?
We all know that Bitcoin has no CEO. The governance structure of Bitcoin consists of users who pay transaction fees, miners who build the Bitcoin blockchain, and node operators who verify the transaction ledger. This decentralized structure ensures the security and decentralization of Bitcoin to a certain extent, but it also brings challenges to governance. Needless to say, the position of miners is more based on the incentive level. They choose the consensus on the future of Bitcoin based on the incentives they receive.
As for the core developers, MICHAEL, a German engineer, entrepreneur and investor, believes that we can admire them, we can donate to them, but we must never regard them as our allies. Because core developers are software developers. The nature of all developers likes to patch and improve the code, add new features and remove old features. We obviously need their work and should reward it. However, we must monitor and criticize their work even more. Since we can never know exactly when and which core developers succumb to "I Can Fix Bitcoin Syndrome", we need to assume that they all have and do not trust every line of code they write.
From a node and community perspective, the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process seems to be an informal process. Less than 1% of Bitcoin users operate nodes, and 99% of Bitcoin users are just "casual" users who temporarily own Bitcoin in escrow accounts, and they are completely out of the discussion. If they don't operate a node, does their opinion still matter? It's an interesting question, but Bitcoin will argue that their opinion doesn't matter. The block size war pitted the 99% of Bitcoin users against the technical 1%, and when some of the 99% of Bitcoin became node operators, it led to a hard fork.
People from all angles and backgrounds cannot be stopped from having visions and expectations for Bitcoin. Bitcoin's "block size war" reveals the fierce conflict and intersection of technical viewpoints in the blockchain world. This debate not only reshaped the development of Bitcoin, but also prompted many people to realize that when building blockchain technology, various design objectives and strategies must be carefully weighed. How to find consensus on core issues in the future blockchain community and start a healthy competition along the technical path is still a long way to go.
However, one thing is certain: the spirit and culture of Bitcoin will never wither because of differences of opinion in the community. Each of us is not only a witness to this history, but also a participant in it.
References:
https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/09/theres-no-such-thing-as-high-fees-on-bitcoin/；
https://michaelantonfischer.com/i-can-fix-bitcoin-syndrome；
