Bitcoin Block Size War

No other event in Bitcoin’s history contained an existential threat quite like the blocksize war of 2017. The term ‘civil war’ is often used to describe the years of 2015 through 2017 in the Bitcoin community. There were two primary camps during the blocksize war: small blockers and big blockers. Ultimately the small blockers won the war, but it’s a lot more complicated to explain what happened because at the time, censorship and really dirty stuff started happening in the Bitcoin forums.

What appeared on the surface, namely, the difference of opinions about how many megabytes of data should fit into one block devolved into a deeper question about who controls the future of Bitcoin. Another question that arose during this civil war is how people define Bitcoin itself: a peer-to-peer cash system as described by Satoshi Nakamoto or a store of value, a digital gold that is resilient, decentralized and censorship resistant? The questions continued to go deeper and deeper as the Bitcoin community ossified into two opposing camps with the end result being Bitcoin Cash forking from Bitcoin on August 1, 2017 at block number 478558.

The thing I found a bit unsettling was that many of the Blockstream people were overly aggressive and used tactics of war to influence people’s opinions. Very few people had the ability to fully grasp the intricacies and ramifications of altering the amount of data contained in a Bitcoin block, so the Blockstream camp’s aggression, censorship and threatening behavior muddied the waters considerably.

A good resource for further reading on this topic is Jonathan Bier’s The Blocksize War: The battle over who controls Bitcoin’s protocol rules: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YQMC2WM

Many of the main players in the Bitcoin blocksize war are depicted in my painting.