The Great Bitcoin Scaling Debate — A Timeline

Why have so many attempts to scale Bitcoin’s blockchain failed?

This timeline chronicles the repeated attempts to scale Bitcoin’s blockchain, and details how each attempt has — so far — been unsuccessful. It. covers all important dates in the scaling debate, focusing on how and why alternative implementations of Bitcoin have sprung up in an effort to scale the blockchain to a larger size.

A brief overview of why the block size of 1 MB has never increased:

Efforts to increase the block size of Bitcoin began with appeals from developers like Gavin Andresen, Jeff Garzik, and Mike Hearn as early as 2011. They anticipated a time when the rate of transactions would exceed the available space in blocks and sought to increase the block size limit — a change that might seem straightforward. The block size was put in place to limit the possibility that someone could cheaply spam the network. Sending a large number of transactions was cheap, and it would have been possible to crowd out other transactions for a small investment.

The spam control mechanism persists in the form of the block size limit of 1 MB, which in turn limits the transactions per second on the network to about three. While every effort to scale Bitcoin has so far failed for a variety of reasons, what they were seeking to accomplish is still a problem that needs fixing. Developers working on Bitcoin’s main Github repository agree that a block size increase needs to happen, but they have not yet established a way to do this with broad consensus. And they seem to have given up trying for a hard fork block size increase, working towards off-chain solutions that do not require the building of network-wide consensus.

The most recent attempt to increase the base block size of Bitcoin took the form of Segwit2x, which was intended to follow from the introduction of Segregated Witness (Segwit) with a doubling of the block size limit. Segwit2x, and other block size attempts before it, fail because the culture, technology, and governing development team is resistant to what has been deemed ‘contentious.’ A ‘contentious’ proposal is something that doesn’t yet have complete support from the Bitcoin community. Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Unlimited and Segwit2x are all examples of alternative clients that have sought to build a consensus in larger block sizes.

My hope is that this timeline provides insight into this long-running debate. The moments I’ve pulled from the block size debate provide an on-the-ground view of how block size proposals are born, and how different actors in the Bitcoin community respond to the proposals. While some groups welcome simple block size increases, others label these attempts as risky, dangerous, or even an ‘attack on Bitcoin itself’. As you read this timeline, please keep in mind that it’s not intended to be comprehensive, and I’m not intending to come off as completely unbiased. If I left out my personal understanding of the scaling debates and how I understood these arguments _at the time, _I would be leaving out the most interesting part of Bitcoin to me: the social layer on top of the math. That’s what draws me to Bitcoin. On one hand there are a set of rules defined by algorithms and raw hashpower; on the other, social and economic values govern how individuals respond to threats and perceived attacks.

To create this timeline, I’ve pulled from developer mailing lists, blog posts from developers, the Chinese bitcoin community, and additional vetted sources from around the net. I’ve tried to highlight pivotal moments only, and have included petty drama only when it’s appropriate for telling the complete story.

I think it’s important to also start with a quote from Paul Sztorc from his blog post “Salvaging the Blocksize Debate”

My only purpose here, is to comfort those who are frustrated. I hope to explain _why _the blocksize conversation is so horrible, and help move it forward. If you aren’t interested in that, now’s the time to navigate elsewhere.

Continue the timeline here: https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-timeline-6108081dbada