i talked about these many times before, but im gonna talk about it again...

because... why not.

the most important thing about the bitcoin blockchain is the decenterlization. decenterlization must trump everything. and we should never sacrifice decentralization, even a little bit of decentralization, to achieve something else. because if the bitcoin blockchain is not decentralized, what is the point of all of this? what are we all doing here? right?

so how do we achieve decentralization? well to achieve decentralization, everybody should run their own full node. right? but it doesn't happen by saying "oh you should run your own full node". it doesn't work like that. right? because running a full node by itself should be easy. right? you should be able to run a full node not only on your server or pc, but also on your phone. right? that's the point of bitcoin, everybody having a copy of the blockchain. so they can verify it themselves.

when you can't trust people, you can trust the bitcoin blockchain and the network. bitcoin blockchain is the final source of truth globally.

its purpose is not to be something that people use for anything, its not the internet. because if you try to do other things with it, you will have to sacrifice decentralization. and you should never sacrifice decentralization for anything.

more data = less decentralization.

the point of bitcoin and its decenterlization is that so you don't have to ask anyone the state of the blockchain, you can verify it yourself. the point is that we have a common global source of truth copied by everyone, so we can all agree on the state of things.

if everybody is going to have a copy of this blockchain, then it should as small as possible. right? in an ideal world, the whole blockchain should be maybe 1GB rn, right? but in a real world we should have some balance, some middle ground.

satoshi decided that every block should be 1 megabyte. (if you asked me it could have been even smaller)

some might say "but bitcoin needs to scale", but the thing is bitcoin can already scale with layers. so if we are suppose to keep the blockchain small so everybody can have a copy of it. then we dont scale by having more txs and more data in the blockchain. we scale by having layers on top of the blockchain. like lightning network, liquid network, etc. and when someone tries to fuck you on the lightning, you can see that on the bitcoin blockchain, the global source of truth and stop them.

more data = more centralization.

if you can't stay decenterlized at the same time, scaling has no purpose.

and the truth is there is nothing wrong about keeping some spending money a custodion lightning wallet. and there is nothing wrong about using fedimints or cashu. until we find something even better without sacrificing decentralization.

so in the genesis of bitcoin, the blocks were 1 megabyte. but also at the genesis of bitcoin, we had some problems. some logical errors with the way we hash the tx and the scripts. so we created segwit to solve this issue. the segwit soft fork. it was using a new space to hold the script data. which is fine and makes sense. but for some reasons we also thought making the block size 4x bigger in the same fork was a good idea...

and no if we still had the 1 megabyte block size, they wouldn't all be filled to the brim with transactions. because nobody is waiting in line to pay tx fees while the network is congested. everybody would have used things like lightning more.

so now we have to live with this and find a way to make it work. with 4MB blocks...

and so far the bitcoin core repository showed zero effort to make bitcoin more decentralized. they are only focusing on adding more features. they care about what bitcoin can do for them. not what a node runner needs to run a full node. they see bitcoin as something work in progress, not a stable foundation that you can confidently build on top of.

and thats why i can say "they lost their way", because they didn't show any effort to sacrifice anything to make bitcoin more decentralized. they always bit by bit sacrifice decentralization... for other things.

and that's why we need protocol ossification. we need more bitcoin node/client implementations. not only forks and cli tools, but software for the end user, build from scratch. a software that prioritizes making running your own full node easier.