@IMightBeAPenguin 1 April 2021

Why I No Longer Support Big Blocks

After thinking about the scaling debate and really starting to educate myself on Bitcoin, I thought I had a lot of knowledge on how to scale Bitcoin by increasing the blocksize limit. Little did I realize that I was wrong. You see, it may seem like common sense to want to increase the blocksize, but after spending some time in the BCash community, I came to realize that this perspective is completely wrong, and blocks that are even slightly big according to my arbitrary standards means Bitcoin will become Visa and Mastercard 2.0. Satoshi put the limit in for a reason, and he absolutely never intended for it to be raised. What makes Bitcoin so great is decentralization, of which, BCash has none. With a 32 MB block limit, BCash requires a sophisticated data center for someone to be able to run a full node. Even with the REAL Bitcoin's blocksize limit of 1 MB, full nodes are too expensive to run, which is why intelligent developers like Luke-Jr suggest lowering the blocksize limit even more through a softfork (the only way to gain consensus that will never cause a chain split, and is 100% voluntary). https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366 https://read.cash/@mtrycz/how-my-rpi4-handles-scalenets-256mb-blocks-539856cd As I looked at the numbers, and it turns out that even with 1 MB blocks, there still are people who cannot run a full node, which isn't good enough for the world's reserve currency. I came to realize that even 1 MB is way too much, and encourages centralization, potentially making even BTC as bad as Mastercard. When it comes to wealth inequality in the world, there are people who earn less than a few dollars a day. If even the poorest cannot afford to run a full-node, only the richest people can. This made me realize that ideally, the blocksize limit should only be 300 KB, like Luke Jr suggests, but then it occurred to me: There are also people who cannot afford to run a full-node, because the hardware they have doesn't support it. With this in mind, I realized that we need to make blocks 5 KB, so people can run their own full nodes on pocket calculators. However, not everybody has pocket calculators, or even has hardware. To ensure that even the homeless could afford to run a full node, I realized that blocks need to be small enough that people using Bitcoin can verify transactions, and keep records of the blockchain on pencil and paper. This would require blocks to only be 2 KB at most, but even then, there are people who are mentally slow, so instead, there should only be coinbase transactions in each block, so everyone can keep up with the blockchain. Only then did I realize that there's still a few serious issues that still weren't addressed: the filthy miners are centralizing the system and only care about short-term incentives even if it means compromising Bitcoin's core properties. To add, illiterate people cannot write records of the blockchain on pencil and paper, and might even have to rely on third parties such as other people who are educated and literate. If you have to trust third parties, it truly isn't Bitcoin. If we want nodes to be as cheap as possible, we need 0 byte blocks. This means no bandwidth concerns for users, regardless of where they live. However, there still is the centralization pressure of having to store the blockchain, which none of us can risk if we want Bitcoin to be as decentralized a possible. This leads me to the ULTIMATE scaling solution for Bitcoin: The next block should be -340 GB in size (or whatever the size of the current blockchain is, multiplied by negative 1), deleting the whole blockchain, making it disintegrate into nothingness, so that way, Bitcoin can be 100% decentralized. If people want to buy anything, they don't need their transaction to be immutable. They can just use Visa and Mastercard instead. It's 100% okay as long as the base layer is decentralized, and ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE can run their own full-node, which is why a blocksize limit any larger than -340 GB makes Bitcoin a centralized shitcoin!