Eight Years of Block Size War Blockchain's Philosophical Apocalypse of Checks and Balances

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 has an impact on the decentralization of the entire chain. Different views on this issue have also brought about different consensus designs, and of course, many well-known forks have also been produced. Looking back at the short history of cryptocurrency, the beginning of all this may be counted from today eight years ago.

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 will implement the BIP-101 proposal, which does not require miners to vote. will be activated immediately. This day was later called the "Block Size War Breakout Day".

Blockchain crossroads

Since Bitcoin's creation in 2009, the Bitcoin community has been divided on a number of key issues. Among them, the debate surrounding the size of Bitcoin blocks is the most intense. This controversy first originated from the original design intention of Bitcoin. The mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, set a limit of 1 megabyte per block to prevent meaningless transactions and data bloat. However, with the popularity of Bitcoin, this upper limit began to appear stretched, resulting in network transaction congestion and confirmation time growth. In fact, as early as 2013, core developer Jeff Garzik proposed doubling the block size to 2 megabytes, sparking initial discussions in the Bitcoin community about the block size.

In 2015, the controversy escalated further. Developers who support enlarged blocks have launched the Bitcoin XT project, which attempts 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 communication with Satoshi Nakamoto, tended to increase the block size to 8 megabytes as a strategy to deal with the increase in transaction volume. On the other hand, core developers such as Greg Maxell, Luke-Jr, and Pieter Wuille warn that overscaling could lead to fewer nodes being able to run full nodes, reducing Bitcoin's degree of decentralization. Even proposing that a hard fork may lead to a chaotic split of the network, the infinite 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 believes that the scalability of the chain should have no boundaries, and all smart contracts and data should be included in the chain, while providing larger blocks and lower transaction fees.

The controversy then turned into a severe split in the Bitcoin community. The two sides launched several rounds of heated discussions around the block size, but they were still unable to reach a consensus. What began as a debate over how the network should scale to handle increased transaction volumes has turned into a philosophical debate about Bitcoin's ultimate purpose and "political drama" over how the open-source project should be governed.

In 2017, developers supporting large blocks initiated a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash, directly increasing the block size to 8 megabytes. This led to an official split in the Bitcoin community into two camps. Those who support small blocks continue to maintain Bitcoin's original blockchain, while those who support large blocks create a new Bitcoin Cash blockchain. At this point, the Bitcoin block size dispute led to the first and largest fork in the history of the blockchain.

After the fork, the two chains developed independently, and the block size dispute continued. Bitcoin kept its block size at 1 megabyte, while Bitcoin Cash further increased the block size to 32 megabytes in 2018. In the end, the block size war was won by the small block side. But in fact, winning a battle 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 "big block camp".

Brc 20, Ordinals: new frontiers for power struggle

The Bitcoin Taproot upgrade inadvertently opened up a new design space that allows users to inscribe arbitrary content on the blockchain. In 2023, the Bitcoin ecosystem will gain some unexpected gameplay, brc 20, ordinals, Bitcoin NFT. With the emergence of these methods, new controversies have emerged and intensified, but these are called by many people as another form of block size war.

First of all, due to the emergence of these gameplays, the Gas fee has 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 negligible. But this is not a good thing for some people who cannot afford high gas fees. "I'm mostly onboarding 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 around." Bitcoin educator and Anita Posch tweeted .

More importantly, BRC 20 and Bitcoin NFT have challenged the original 1 M block size limit. The most notable example is that Udi Wertheimer, founder of Meme NFT Taproot Wizards, planned the largest block and transaction in Bitcoin history, with a block size of nearly 4 MB, which was called "the largest Bitcoin block ever." block", which has also been accused by many people of being an attack on Bitcoin.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr 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 increase significantly, resulting in the reduction of full nodes in the entire network and the decline in censorship resistance. At the same time, unexpected huge transactions and huge blocks will impact ecological facilities such as wallets, mining pools, and browsers, causing abnormalities in some facilities, such as certain transactions that cannot be parsed normally. In addition, in order to reduce the time for synchronizing and verifying 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 put on the chain in the witness, and the blocks and transactions are all around. After the 1 M limit, 4 M is fine, and 400 M is fine! In this sense, this is not an innovation, but an attack on a vulnerability!"

Udi's response to this is that he owns a large amount of BTC himself, and this is done to make it stronger. Like anything resistant to stress, what doesn't kill it makes it stronger. He wants to prove a point: the energy around Bitcoin has stagnated, and he wants to change that, knowing that if people like him really pose a threat to Bitcoin, then Bitcoin should fail.

Let's take a look at BRC 20 again. Although the popularity of BRC 20 has dropped compared to a few months ago, it still has a lot of influence. Since April 23, 2023 (when BRC 20 opened transactions), Bitcoin's UTXO set has ballooned from 5 GB to 6.8 GB.

Bitcoin enthusiast Ajian (@AurtrianAjian) believes that this design of BRC 20 has a major impact on the security, economics (scalability) and decentralization of the protocol. First of all, because it is not attached to UTXO, naturally it cannot rely on the anti-repeat spending mechanism of UTXO itself. BRC 20 is entirely based on the "first-come, first-served" principle based on the ordering of block transactions. Without this "first-come, first-served" as the ultimate backing, it is simply impossible to prevent the negative balance, which is a form of double spending.

But there are also voices from many supporters. Nic Carter, co-founder of the investment firm Castle Island Ventures, once said that some Bitcoin supporters today refuse to use the network for new assets like Ordinal NFT and BRC-20. Incorrect. Given the crypto-liberal foundations 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 demand censorship of these non-economic use cases.

Balance of Power: Who Determines the Future of Bitcoin?

Behind these debates are not only differences about technology, but also about the purpose of Bitcoin and the philosophy behind it. Governing decentralized open source projects remains a challenge. What determines the future of Bitcoin? Developer? miner? node? Community?

We all know that Bitcoin has no CEO, and that Bitcoin’s governance structure consists of users who pay transaction fees, miners who build the Bitcoin blockchain, and node operators who validate the transaction ledger. This decentralized structure ensures the security and decentralization of Bitcoin to some extent, but it also brings challenges to governance. Needless to say, the position of the miners is more based on the incentive level. They choose the consensus on the future of Bitcoin according to the incentives they get.

For the core developers, German engineer, entrepreneur and investor MICHAEL believes that we can admire them, we can donate to them, but we must not regard them as our allies. Because core developers are software developers. The nature of all developers loves to tinker and improve code, adding new features and removing old ones. We clearly need their work and should reward it. However, we have to monitor and criticize their work, and since we can never know exactly when and which core developers succumbed to "I Can Fix Bitcoin Syndrome", we need to assume they all have and distrust everything they write. one line of code.

From the perspective of nodes and the community, the Bitcoin improvement proposal process seems to be an informal process. Less than 1% of Bitcoin users operate a node, 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, do their views still matter? It's an interesting question, but Bitcoiners will argue that their point doesn't matter. The block size war pitted the 99% of Bitcoin users against the technical 1%, and when some of the 99% became node operators, it resulted in a hard fork.

People from all angles and backgrounds, with visions and expectations for Bitcoin, cannot be held back. Bitcoin's "block size war" reveals for us the violent conflict and convergence of technical views 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 purposes and strategies must be carefully weighed. How to find a 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.

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