The creator of Ethereum revisited the “Bitcoin block size war” in the late 2010s, rethinking his alliance with the “big block” camp and now admits that the “small block” group is winning for a good reason.
Reflecting on two Bitcoin history books from opposite sides of the debate, Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy blog post on Friday about how Bitcoin should be measured, improved and managed.
Buterin said that advocates of large block sizes want a hard-fork update that will increase the flow of Bitcoin transactions. In retrospect, however, he believes that the big blockers were incompetent to execute their vision properly, which largely contributed to Bitcoin not changing it.
“Less blockers committed far fewer embarrassing technical faux pas, and had positions that led to absurd results if you tried to take them to their logical conclusion,” Vitalik writes.
In general, small blockers seek to lighten the weight of the Bitcoin blockchain in terms of storage requirements for regular users, as well as to prevent changes to Bitcoin from being formalized by large, centralized special interest groups.
Large blockchains, by contrast, want to keep it affordable enough for smaller users to transact on-chain without relying on centralized Layer 2 systems developed by Bitcoin development company Blockstream.
Vitalik cites Jonathan Bier's “The Blocksize War,” which provides a somewhat helpful perspective on the conflict, and Roger Ver's recently published “Bitcoin Hacking,” which comes from a big-block perspective.
Citing Beer, Vitalik said that the various Bitcoin implementations that have been put in place by major blockers are lacking.
“Bitcoin Classic was not well-written code, Bitcoin Unlimited was unnecessarily complicated,” he said.
“One of the worst is the refusal of the big blocks to agree on any realistic principle of how big the blocks should go,” he added. In addition, the alliance of many big blockers with the now accepted Craig Wright has also damaged their reputation.
Vitalik said bigwigs suffered from what he called the “one-sided competence trap,” in which all the smartest and most competent people rally behind an opposition movement. Finally, he believes that the camp prioritizes “resistance” over “construction” and even struggles to unify its efforts behind a single chain.
From today, small obstacles have won. However, many developers believe that Bitcoin is currently facing a similar existential crisis.
Bitcoin Core developer Matt Corrallo recently argued that Bitcoin's future as a peer-to-peer currency looks “bleak” because there are still no effective solutions to scale transactions without relying on intermediaries. This has reignited debate over soft fork ideas and how and when Bitcoin's code should change, as well as what Bitcoin's ultimate goal should actually be.
According to Vitalik, the best way to diffuse political tensions around such issues is not through “mediation” but through “new technology” that satisfies all parties to the dispute. For example, he was disappointed to see that ZK-SNARKs are a privacy and scalability solution mentioned “exactly zero time in either book.”
“The development of Escripts and later BitVM have created new opportunities for Layer 2s, improving what can be done with Lightning,” he added.
Buterin points out that several project groups are working on technology to verify zkSNARKs on Bitcoin, based on Robin Linus' BitVM framework. This could allow for a system to quickly process multiple transactions in off-chain environments before the first decentralized Bitcoin “packages” are added to the chain in one super-efficient transaction.
One of these projects is BitcoinOS – a developing blockchain platform that can increase Bitcoin transactions by 10X while its developers remain decentralized to “defeat state-level attackers”.
The platform does not require any consensus change on Bitcoin Core for it to work.
“Vitalik is right – with ZK everything can be built on Bitcoin and most of the blocksize debate is irrelevant,” said BitcoinOS contributor Aidan Yago in a message to Decrypt. “Of course, if ZK was available at that time, Vitalik would undoubtedly build Ethereum on top of Bitcoin.”
“Because of this, the next Vitalik will emerge from the Bitcoin ecosystem,” predicted Yago.
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