Comment by uncletammy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uncletammy | Hacker News Reader

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I came here to say that. Here's a super informative thread laying out those events from the perspective of one of the Decred developers.

https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pi...

TLDR: Smart contracts on BTC were intentionally strangled because it would necessitate bigger blocks.

At the same time, BTC core devs were gearing up to start their sad push in creating artificial scarcity on a perfectly functional blockchain by reneging on the agreement they made to increase the block size.

They traded their ideals to get rich and all that momentum was lost. Instead of peer to peer cash, we're all left with a thousand useless ponzi schemes and a handful of promising coins that can't work together to actually achieve Satoshi's goal.

At the moment the Bitcoin blockchain size is some 310 gb while the bitcoin cash blockchain, with its larger blocks, is some 180 gb. I just looked it up.

(I think I looked it up the last time I saw this argument too.)

(I also can't easily find it for BSV, the search turned up too many articles about how they're increasing their block size to 2 GB.)

I dont follow. What does the size of either of those blockchains have to do with the discussion?

What point are you making?

At the time there was the argument that larger blocks were bad because they would increase the size of the chain and prevent casual users from storing the whole chain and verifying it themselves.

I think the chain was already too big for casual users at that point!

Oh right. Yeah thats absolutely true.

I always thought the argument that full nodes should be inexpensive to operate made a lot of sense. But keeping blocks small would obviously lead (and clearly did) to transaction costs high enough to price out most people that actually want to use it.

Wait for the lightning network is an insulting reason to kill the p2p cash use case, which in my opinion is the only thing that makes the "store of value" use case work.

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