PANews reported on May 31 that after reading two books about the Bitcoin block size dispute in the 2010s, "The Blocksize War" and "Hijacking Bitcoin", Vitalik published an article to put forward some of his own thoughts on the Bitcoin block size dispute. Vitalik said that when he personally experienced the Bitcoin block size dispute, he usually stood on the side of the big blockers, and his sympathy for the big blockers was mainly concentrated on the following key points:

One of the key promises of Bitcoin was digital cash, and high fees could kill that use case. While Layer 2 protocols could theoretically offer much lower fees, the whole concept has not been fully tested, and it would be highly irresponsible for small blockers to commit to a small block roadmap when they know little about how the Lightning Network will perform in practice. Today, actual experience with the Lightning Network has made the pessimistic view more prevalent.

I personally don’t believe the “meta-level” story on the small block side. Small blockers will often argue that “Bitcoin should be controlled by users” and that “users don’t support big blocks”, but are never willing to identify any specific way to define who “users” are or measure what they want. Big blockers have secretly tried to come up with at least three different ways to count users: hash power, public statements from prominent companies, and social media discourse, and small blockers condemn each of them. Big blockers didn’t organize the New York Agreement because they like “cabals”; they organized the New York Agreement because small blockers insist that any controversial changes require “consensus” among “users”, and a statement signed by major stakeholders is the only way big blockers believe that this can actually be done.

The small blockers proposed a Segwit proposal to increase the block size slightly, which was unnecessarily complex compared to a simple hard fork block size increase. The small blockers ultimately embraced the “soft forks are good, hard forks are bad” philosophy (which I strongly disagree with), and designed a block size increase to accommodate this rule, although Bier admits that the complexity increased so much that many large blockers could not understand the proposal. I feel that the small blockers did not just “support caution”, they arbitrarily chose different types of caution, choosing one (not hard forking) and abandoning another (keeping the code and specifications clean and simple) because it suited their agenda. Ultimately, the large blockers also abandoned “clean and simple” in favor of ideas such as Bitcoin Unlimited’s adaptive block size increase, a decision that Bier (rightfully) criticized them for.

The small block side is indeed engaging in very unseemly acts of social media censorship to impose their views, culminating in Theymos’ infamous statement “If 90% of /r/Bitcoin users find these policies intolerable, then I want those 90% of /r/Bitcoin users to leave.”