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 donât believe the âmeta-levelâ story on the small block side. Small blockers will often argue that âBitcoin should be controlled by usersâ and that âusers donât support big blocksâ, but are never willing to identify any specific way to define who âusersâ 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 didnât organize the New York Agreement because they like âcabalsâ; they organized the New York Agreement because small blockers insist that any controversial changes require âconsensusâ among âusersâ, 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 âsoft forks are good, hard forks are badâ 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 âsupport cautionâ, 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 âclean and simpleâ in favor of ideas such as Bitcoin Unlimitedâs 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 Theymosâ infamous statement âIf 90% of /r/Bitcoin users find these policies intolerable, then I want those 90% of /r/Bitcoin users to leave.â