Anyone who knows me knows I have very strong opinions ranging from operating systems, philosophy, and even things like beauty [larger people are far more visually appealing] or tech in general, so recently, to help clear my head after a rough day, I listened to the audiobook version of “Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC” by Roger Ver along with watching the new Barely Sociable video titled “The Silk Road’s Buried Informant” while playing Phantasy Star Online ver.2 [the April 2001 updated Phantasy Star Online release for Sega Dreamcast], and I got to thinking about the fact that Bitcoin had really lost its way.So let’s talk about the old Large Block vs Small Block war within the Crypto Space that ran from August 2015 to November 2017.
I was always of the idea that if we have smaller blocks it makes it easier for people to run their own nodes. I believed in smaller blocks since in theory these could work on a Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, a cheap VPS, as these can handle the modest requirements of smaller blocks.
That makes sense, right? But the larger blockers would often cry “What about the fees?” or “It’s too slow!” But here’s the thing, machines would and had gotten faster and more powerful over time.
We had something really amazing we could have done. Imagine not needing large farms or datacentres.
Hell, you could have run nodes off mesh networks powered by Raspberry Pi devices with solar panels, but no, somewhere along the way we lost our damn minds.
I believed and still do that projects like Bitcoin, Monero, and others were some of the most important advances of the 2000s and 2010s behind the ESP32 chip [which allowed mesh networks like MeshCore and Meshtastic]. Sadly, large blockers stumbled in like a bowling ball and really messed things up. From what I’ve been able to understand from all the sources on the Blocksize Wars, large blockers believed that more power, despite it causing centralization, could have helped.
Oh yes, let’s take this amazing project that was meant to be spread out and then drag it into the hands of key players.
Now I know large blockers also wanted things to get bigger, but here’s the difference between what some small blockers I knew at the time and even myself thought was smarter.
Slower scaling, slower gradual growth in size. My view was always, let’s nudge it up as hardware naturally improves, but sadly the large blockers’ idea was closer to leapfrogging multiple generations overnight, to the point where consumer hardware was not really an option for the majority of users.
I doubt we’ll ever go back. Now, I am not trying to bash Bitcoin; it’s a key and important factor in the world of crypto, but I feel that Monero and other privacy coins have over time taken the place of the dream Bitcoin promised, a digital cash that allows for privacy.
I am honestly thinking this could make a good longer article, but for now I just wanted to get this out of my head and would love some feedback from my readers on what you think about this.
Do you think Bitcoin could make a turnaround, or is the vision Satoshi had long gone?
Anyways, got some lunch waiting for me down the road so I’ll see ya all around.
Mahalo…yeah nah, that closing line isn’t right.
I’ll keep workshopping a closing line.
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