Best short summary of the BS wars.

I was on the wrong side of this debate until Satoshi Roundtable in Mexico where I got to speak to some genuinely smart well known people.

My initial perspective was “don’t rock the boat, keep bumping default size limits in bitcoin.conf — which had been done for many years already— rather than mess up the small bitcoin economy.

But what I learned at SR was elegant and simple. If filling up blocks kills bitcoin, then bitcoin is dead because that is the ultimate requirement for security in the future. Filling up blocks will either create conditions for better/wiser/more efficient use of block space or we shall see how valuable bitcoin is when security must be paid for as ultimately intended (fees not inflation).

I see now what most small blockers were asking for was a continued hand out to keep their businesses profitable. If they got big blocks I guarantee you miners would get to skip a halving down the road.

I, like many others, didn’t understand the importance of running my own node…I did it to help others download the chain, but that was unnecessary by 2016. The real reason to run a node is to serve as a rule checker and enforce monetary policy and all block rules to protect censorship resistance. Otherwise anyone who can benefit from violating rules will violate the rules.