Vitalik Shares Thoughts on Bitcoin Block Size Debate

According to PANews, after reading two books on the Bitcoin block size debate of the 2010s, 'The Blocksize War' and 'Hijacking Bitcoin', Vitalik has shared his thoughts on the matter. He stated that when personally experiencing the Bitcoin block size debate, individuals often side with the big block camp, with sympathy for the big block side mainly focusing on several key points: Bitcoin's initial key promise was digital cash, and high fees could potentially kill this use case. While Layer2 protocols can theoretically offer much lower fees, the whole concept has not been sufficiently tested, and the small block camp's promise of a small block roadmap is very irresponsible, as they know very little about the performance of the Lightning Network in practice. Today, practical experience with the Lightning Network has made pessimistic views more common. Vitalik does not believe in the 'meta-level' story of the small block camp. Small block supporters often argue that 'Bitcoin should be controlled by users', 'users do not support big blocks', but they are never willing to determine any specific way to define who are 'users' or measure what they want. Big block supporters have secretly tried to propose at least three different ways of counting users: hash power, public statements from well-known companies, and social media discourse, with small block supporters condemning each method. The big block supporters organized the New York Agreement not because they liked 'conspiracy groups'; they organized the New York Agreement because the small block supporters insisted that any controversial changes required 'consensus' among 'users', and a statement signed by major stakeholders was the only feasible method that the big block supporters believed could truly achieve this. The Segregated Witness proposal put forward by the small block camp aims to slightly increase the block size, which is overly complicated and unnecessary compared to a simple hard fork block size increase. The small block camp ultimately adheres to the idea of 'soft forks good, hard forks bad' (which Vitalik strongly opposes), and designed a method to increase the block size to accommodate this rule, even though Bier admits that the complexity has greatly increased to the point where many big block camps cannot understand the plan. In the end, the big block camp also abandoned 'clean and simple', and instead adopted ideas such as Bitcoin Unlimited's adaptive block size increase, which Bier (rightly) heavily criticized. The small block camp is indeed conducting very inappropriate social media censorship to impose their views, which ultimately led to Theymos's infamous statement 'If 90% of /r/Bitcoin users think these policies are intolerable, then I hope these 90% of /r/Bitcoin users leave.'