BHs on the other hand made sure that Bitcoin implementation ended up becoming clunky and inefficient, so that it could never actually become the "freedom currency" and give us freedom.
The way this happened was with Satoshi inserting the 1MB per block limit. It was always meant to be removed but after Satoshi left the project and it was commandeered by Blockstream, they made sure to cement it in permanently to create artificial scarcity so it couldn't scale.
It's like if we talking about the printing press, and if back then they said "we have to limit all printing presses so that no book can be longer than 100 pages, because if books are longer than 100 pages, nobody would be able to afford to print their own books!"
Good analogy, but I have always found it a bit difficult to understand how people fell for a 1MB limit in 2010 - when computational scarcity was already a thing of the past. Its not like they couldnt foresee that it would become a bottleneck soon down the road.
At the time Bitcoin was just a few people running the software on consumer laptops and desktops which was not providing much hashpower. Satoshi wanted to prevent potential bad actors from renting out a massive server farm to spam attack the network with 1GB blocks which would have basically stopped Bitcoin dead in its tracks in those early days.
Satoshi left instructions for how to gradually increase and eventually remove the limit altogether, but Blockstream insisted on making it permanent. Bitcoin Cash is now at a 32MB limit and will be changing to dynamic block limits later this year.
If I remember correctly, wasnt there a point where a huge transaction was in the queue that was going to grind the whole Bitcoin to a halt which forced them to make the change quickly? Or was that something else unrelated to block size?
The way this happened was with Satoshi inserting the 1MB per block limit. It was always meant to be removed but after Satoshi left the project and it was commandeered by Blockstream, they made sure to cement it in permanently to create artificial scarcity so it couldn't scale.
It's like if we talking about the printing press, and if back then they said "we have to limit all printing presses so that no book can be longer than 100 pages, because if books are longer than 100 pages, nobody would be able to afford to print their own books!"
Good analogy, but I have always found it a bit difficult to understand how people fell for a 1MB limit in 2010 - when computational scarcity was already a thing of the past. Its not like they couldnt foresee that it would become a bottleneck soon down the road.
At the time Bitcoin was just a few people running the software on consumer laptops and desktops which was not providing much hashpower. Satoshi wanted to prevent potential bad actors from renting out a massive server farm to spam attack the network with 1GB blocks which would have basically stopped Bitcoin dead in its tracks in those early days.
Satoshi left instructions for how to gradually increase and eventually remove the limit altogether, but Blockstream insisted on making it permanent. Bitcoin Cash is now at a 32MB limit and will be changing to dynamic block limits later this year.
If I remember correctly, wasnt there a point where a huge transaction was in the queue that was going to grind the whole Bitcoin to a halt which forced them to make the change quickly? Or was that something else unrelated to block size?
Doesn't ring a bell. What time frame was that?