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Comment by shea256 | Hacker News Reader

> Core (the main Bitcoin development team) promised to provide a block size scaling solution and then reneged.

This is not true at all and highly deceptive. They originally were supportive of doubling the transaction count via an increase to 2MB blocks and then realized they could accomplish this without a hard fork via SegWit.

SegWit does in fact allow for 1.7x the number of single-signature transactions per block and 4x for multi-signature transactions.

Core absolutely could have handled the communications around this better. But to say they reneged on providing a scaling solution is wrong.

It's also important to keep in mind that what matters is not the block size but the number of transactions that can fit into a block. Block size doubling and cutting transaction sizes in half each double the throughput.

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> But to say they reneged on providing a scaling solution is wrong.

Regardless of your position in the debate, to say that many well-known Core developers reneged is absolutely defensible, given than they signed this: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con...

The agreement between all these parties was that they'd all support a SegWit soft-fork if Core developers also provided code and support for a ~2mb hard fork.

> Block size doubling and cutting transaction sizes in half each double the throughput.

You can only cut transaction sizes in half once, but you can always double the block size again. Let's just double the block size?

SegWit does not cut block sizes in half it moves some data out of the main block and in to the SegWit block. Full nodes will need more disk space per transaction with SegWit not less.

There is nothing deceptive about saying Core did not deliver on their promise to increase the block size. We still don't have a block size increase. Saying that SegWit provides the promised increase is deceptive. SegWit provides a theoretical 1.7x increase but only if everyone switches to SegWit transactions. To send a SegWit transaction you must upgrade your software, understand how to configure it to send SegWit transactions and be sure that the receiver's software understands SegWit. The only conclusion is that SegWit's effective block size increase will not take effective immediately.

Regardless, Core signed an agreement with a majority of miners that they would implement a block size increase, not an effective block size increase but a real one. They reneged on this promise and are instead telling everyone that they are going to do as they please because miners don't control BitCoin.

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