That is indeed the claim made by Bitcoin Cash promoters. However it’s not particularly convincing to treat Satoshi’s vision as the ultimate truth, and borders on religious. Shouldn’t developers who have now worked with this technology for a decade have a greater understanding, now? One of Bitcoin’s greatest attributes is that it can evolve and be updated!

Furthermore BCH has seen virtually no transactions, especially compared to bitcoin, so all it’s claims of superiority are untested. This makes people who proclaim them as facts quite suspect.

For example - since you don’t understand why - big blocks centralize. “Just make the blocks bigger” means more and more storage of a permanent ledger, which means less and less people can run a node. Of course, since there have historically been virtually no transactions on BCH, it’s easy to throw this consideration to the wind and claim the solution is infallible.

Is that the future we want, when even when pushed to it’s maximum vanilla on-chain cryptocurrency struggles to compete with Visa or Coinbase for usability? Or should we strive to maximize what cryptocurrency really delivers on: uncensorable settlement of a stateless store of value?

You don't really need to believe in anyone's "vision", you just need to look at what's happening, right now. BTC's transactions fees are very high, and transactions are often stuck in the mempool for quite some time.

That does not happen with BCH.

It's all very well claiming that BTC is more "decentralized", but if you can't actually use it to cheaply and quickly transact, then what is the point?

That doesn’t happen with BCH because they haven’t saturated their blocks. That doesn’t mean it’s a better approach.

I can decide to spend all my retirement savings over the next two years and, for a while, it would be quite nice. Should I then ask why anyone even bothers to save?

Why do you think the BCH blocks aren't filling up?

Maybe it has something to do with the increased block size?

Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum both exceed bitcoin's transaction throughput now. Ethereum has around 3x the transaction throughput.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-bc...

> “Just make the blocks bigger” means more and more storage of a permanent ledger, which means less and less people can run a node."

This argument was already debunked by the Bitcoin community from the beginning before the hard fork even happened though - Moore's Law. Disk space rises and price goes down as time goes by - it really wasn't ever an issue. Even 2mb, 4mb would've been enough for the next few years.

If the blocks just keep increasing in size to accommodate small fees then there won't by any (or just a tiny) reward for miners once the block-reward runs out. This will make the hashrate go down significantly and make Bitcoin as a blockchain very unsecure and vurnable.

There was a site that ran the calculations. Assuming terabyte sized blocks you would be able to fund multiple $20 million dollar data centers per year. By fund I mean build new ones.

We’re outpacing Moore’s law

2mb or 4mb would have helped, yes. I don’t think it would have been too big of a problem, but I don’t think it would help much either. We’d just be back against the limit.

If we want to really succeed we need innovation.

The innovation already happened.

There is no technical reason why multiple orders of magnitude more transactions couldn't be on the bitcoin chain if it wasn't intentionally crippled.

If your internet connection had the throughput of bitcoin it would take you 36 minutes to load reddit.com

Anyone can rent a VPS for $10 USD that can download the entire chain in under an hour and a half.

There are 14TB single hard drives out now, which would be able to store the bitcoin chain for the next 300 years. One hard drive, 300 years.

The only part that doesn't work is the $31.50 average transaction fee.

Wow, I just checked - you weren’t kidding. 14TB for ~300 USD. Any person living in a third world country and bought BTC 2 years ago would be able to afford that - decentralization isn’t an issue. But yeah, this just further proves what a weak argument it was for BTC to go with small blocks.

> big blocks centralize

This math never checks out. I see this said and no one can ever show me numbers where it makes sense.

900KB Every 10 minutes is the actual throughput. This works out to 47.3GB per year.

For the cost of -5 transactions-, you can buy a hard drive that will last -184 years- before it fills up. The only people that even need the full chain are miners, exchanges and online wallets.

5 transactions -> enough space to store the current throughput for 184 years. $31 average transaction fees make bitcoin useless for anything other than speculation.

Bitcoin Cash already sustains more transactions than bitcoin. Ethereum has 3x the transaction throughput consistently. What math are you doing where you think any of this is a problem?

And this nonsense doublespeak is why Ethereum 2.0 (proof of stake, sharding for real scaling) will get all my investment for the next cycle and why it will eventually be the dominant cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin was a beautiful idea but it was ruined when it refused to scale. Like Brian Armstrong, the ceo of Coinbase has said, Bitcoin broke my heart when it chose that path.

https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2017/11/bitcoin-broke-coinbase-ceo...

BCH has actually been doing more transactions than Bitcoin recently.

If Bitcoin can evolve and be updated, one would hope it could evolve to a larger block size.

Maybe super super large blocks would add some centralizing forces. But 8/16/32MB? Not at all.

Bitcoin added 66GB to it’s permanent ledger in the last year. Saturated 16Mb blocks would add a Tb a year. It’s hard to see how that won’t be centralizing after a few years and people need 3TB just to get started. Not to mention the task of syncing and transferring on a less than perfect connection. Yes, storage does get cheaper, but cryptocurrency is outpacing it dramatically.

And even with these big blocks, we’d have nowhere near a competitive solution, less than 7% of Visa volume. “Raise the block size again” would only get so far. We need something better. I’m not sure lightning is the answer, but at least it shows such a thing is possible. We don’t need big blocks.

That's fine. Not every home user needs to run a full node. That is a, frankly obvious, misconception that the current maintainers have saddled themselves with.

As others have alluded to, Satoshi specifically predicted that bitcoin would be run by large datacenters. Is it "religion" to prefer the vision of the inventor of one of the most brilliant innovations of a century? A vision that has proven itself against all reason and criticism (often coming from the very same people who are now the maintainers).

With all due respect to the core developers, they are a bunch of crypto geeks (which is fine), but Satoshi was a genius who also understood economy, psychology and a bunch of other stuff, which is why bitcoin exists and is an incredible success.

When you say that Satoshi predicted that Bitcoin would be run by large datacenters, are you referring to the mining? Or the nodes? Anyways, I'd like to see this actual post you're referencing (look at https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/). I've read a lot of his posts and never seen this mentioned. It also seems very anti-Bitcoin.

I'm not saying that every home user needs to run a full node though.

Nodes. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306

"The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate."

1.5KB/s

That's the current throughput of bitcoin. When the ridiculousness of that is pointed out, why do people start talking about Visa's volume?

Bitcoin is unusable for regular transactions.

A single transaction costs as much as an -entire hard drive- that can store the current chain multiple times over. After 11 years the chain takes up $6 of hard drive space.

The only people that need to sync with the chain are miners, exchanges, online wallets and enthusiasts.

Both choices lead to “centralizing”. With the existing throughput of BTC, were it to be adopted by the entire world, each person would get one transaction per several decades. This means that virtually all transactions must be done off chain through hubs.

I think it is important to realize how these huge policy decisions are left in the hands of a few individuals too.

Citation needed, last time I looked into this, the internet could handle 8mb blocks before a significant number of nodes %4 percent wouldn't be able to mint blocks in time.

What's the current research show?

> The original plan for Bitcoin envisioned larger blocks to keep transactions fees down.

The plan was always for security to be provided by transaction fees in the long term, as block subsidy dwindles to insignificance. But you just can't get reasonable security from 1-cent tx fees.

Well, traditional payment systems provide sufficient security for lower fees (though not 1 cent, i believe).

Hundreds of millions of transactions a day at 25 cent in fees per tx lead to much higher total fees than 300,000 transactions at $30 fees per tx.

Here is a proposal for terabyte blocks:

https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks...

It works out just fine and there will enough profit from sub cent transaction fees to have thousands of competing data centers. At that point you could even declare the system to be more cost effective than any other kind of financial infrastructure.

Any complaints against Bitcoin's excessive energy consumption would be void, except this is not the future that Bitcoin HODLers want so it's incredibly difficult to see how their theories would become true in the future.

Increasing the block size makes the blockchain harder to decentralize, and in the end, it doesn't solve the problem, but just kicks the can down the road. It just doesn't make sense to store every coffee payment forever in the blockchain. That's why the focus is on security and decentralization, and let second layer solutions deal with the payments problem (privacy, latency, throughput). That's the plan for now, until someone comes up with a better idea.